There are two main camps of people who perform SEO, affiliate SEO and local SEO. Affiliate SEO is the practice of making a website filled with affiliate links for a product or service rank and then profiting from people who make a purchase using that link. Typically affiliate SEO is done on a worldwide basis for corporations that will ship worldwide, as few online marketers wish to limit themselves when working on an affiliate basis.
The other common form of SEO is local SEO. This is when a particular business seeks to rank highly in Google for very location specific terms such as “Los Angeles lawyers” or “Dayton Ohio Plumbers.” These individuals are typically very skilled at the discipline they are trying to sell, but how much would you expect a lawyer to know about ranking in Google? This is where specialized SEO teams come in like KnP Net Media SEO in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
The business that wishes to rank first for their local search term contracts the SEO agency to help them rank for a particular keyword of their choice within their geographical region. Google is well aware of where people are when making Google searches, for instance just searching for “food” will bring up local restaurants instead of food in just any place of the world. For this reason, a market has risen.
Both parties benefit from the exchange. Local online marketers get paid a fee for their time and expertise in increasing the exposure of a business in search results, and the business gets the benefit of more people becoming aware of the service they provide. Previously unknown shops tucked in nooks and crannies around town can increase their online presence and find many customers in their hometowns that had no idea their business even existed.
In more competitive industries, companies that currently don’t have the budget for flashy advertisements or enough customers for proper word-of-mouth advertising can compete with others in their industry via the internet. Most people now tend to do a bit of research online to understand all of the choices they have before they commit to a purchase. A previously unknown business in a competitive marketplace can get massive amounts of exposure relatively inexpensively depending on how many people in that city are looking for that particular kind of service.
In this way, it is a local business (or at least a local branch of a larger business) supporting another local business, helping to make everybody more money and in turn build stronger communities. Many people simply frequent the stores they do currently out of convenience and not knowing what else is out there, a properly designed and optimized web presence can bring a local business right to the eyeballs of interested customers.
In the end, local businesses get to go digital and always have a “billboard” of a sort that people can see and then decide whether or not they’d like to follow up with them. Niche shops are becoming more viable in smaller towns because people are able to make Google searches for their interests and find the closest shops to them that service that need. Before local SEO, these shops would tend to fizzle out over time due to nobody really knowing about them.