Here at Zelst, we worked with a legal client on strengthening their local SEO, improving their Google My Business visibility by 84% and clicks-to-call by 86% in just one year.

With multiple offices located across the north of England, our client in the highly-competitive area of medical negligence law wanted to drive visibility, traffic and engagement amongst their local audience to increase the number and quality of inquiries overall and gain an advantage over nearby competitors. We helped them to achieve these goals by implementing local search strategies, including optimizing their Google My Business and Bing Places for Business profiles.

Local SEO relates to the organic search visibility of your business on a local scale. When a user searches for a key term that has a local intent, Google recognizes this and displays the most relevant results in relation to the user’s location.

Local SEO is particularly important if you have physical stores or offices and want to capture the attention of your local audience. By implementing an effective local SEO strategy and following best practices, you can increase your visibility, traffic and conversions overall.

The first step to building a strong and successful local SEO presence is to make sure all your details are correct to appear in the search results. Using the correct business name, address (if applicable) and phone number on your Google My Business and Bing Places for Business listings is crucial - this is known as your NAP (name, address, phone number).

Not only are you providing essential information to potential or existing clients who come across your business, but you are also helping to drive interactions. By optimizing our client’s Google My Business and Bing Places profiles, we helped to increase phone calls by 86%, direction requests by 109% and profile views by 84% in 2023.

We also introduced high-quality and relevant imagery to our client’s profiles to improve engagement and provide a strong, on-brand impression to those looking at their profile in local search results.

Creating location pages on your site that target local search terms can increase your visibility amongst potential clients in concentrated areas. We did this for our client by carrying out area-based keyword research and implementing terms with local intent on newly created and optimized contact pages. We then connected each page to its individual Google and Bing profiles.

With optimized location pages, our client’s local visibility increased from 53.01% in January 2023 up to 91.68% in December 2023, as you can see in the graph below.

On top of this, we captured featured snippets and local pack features for our target terms, giving our client even more real estate in the SERPs.

These results can be maintained by following best practices and continuing to take care of your local SEO pages and profiles, as we do on behalf of our client.

For example, you should keep your opening and holiday hours up-to-date, post frequent informational posts to your profiles, and respond to reviews promptly. Keeping your profile active can build authority, trust and customer loyalty. Plus, it can help you to appear in local SERPs, giving you further visibility.

Across 2023, we increased our client’s website visits via local SEO profiles by 114.2%, driving an 86% increase in phone calls from Google My Business alone. What’s more, search visibility for local terms increased by 39% and total number of sessions across location pages increased by 671% YoY.

With a well-nurtured local search strategy, you can improve visibility to increase inquiries, engagement and brand awareness amongst your local audience. At Zelst, our team of content marketing and technical strategists is here to help you achieve market leadership in your local area. To start your local SEO journey, please contact us today.