Anyone who owns a business or is thinking about starting one knows that being visible online is crucial to success. After all, potential customers need to be able to find you before they can give you their business. Edmonton is the capital city of Alberta and is the second-largest city in the province. It is also the fifth-largest municipality in Canada. The city has a rich history, diverse culture, and vibrant economy. The city has a population of over 932,000 and a metropolitan population of over 1,321,000. That's why local SEO in Edmonton is so important.
For those unfamiliar with the term, local SEO is the process of optimizing your online content for discovery by people in your city or region. If you're a business in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, then you need to make sure you're doing local SEO. Why? Because 78% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit the business within 24 hours, and 50% of those searches result in a purchase. If you want your business to thrive, then you need to be visible in local search results.
Any business with a physical location or serving a geographic area can benefit from local SEO. If someone searches for important keywords relevant to your business and a map with 3 listings appears next to its (also known as a map pack), then local SEO could help you expand your company.
Let's understand how google works first since we need to understand local SEO.
When you start typing into the search box of google, it checks the patterns of different website signals and ranking factors such as how relevant the site is. And returns a list of sites that match the search. Many people think that google does live searches of the entire internet. But it is not true. Actually, google searched for a saved copy of all the sites that Google discovered earlier. These saved copies are called Google Index. To form the index, Google uses small programs called “spiders” to crawl the web. Each spider works the same way: It starts on a single page, then follows the links on that page, looks at content on the next pages, and so on. As web content gets crawled, it’s stored in Google’s servers, and the index is built. The spiders work at a mind-blowing scale, constantly crawling trillions of pages at an incredibly rapid pace. This confirms that the index is as up-to-date as possible and new sites and connections are found fast.
Google use different process to rank thousands of sites in the blink of eye. This process is called algorithm. When people search on the google an algorithm checks the index and give a list of a websites that match your search in results. These results are based on relevance, prominence and popularity given by inbound links.
For local organic search results, google after analyzing the behavior of users during trillions of searches, google figured out that people seeking specific types of businesses need results from their nearest area. That’s why Google’s local search algorithm includes a proximity factor, which is a fancy way of saying that google takes your location into account when you search for a local keyword. This happens even when the searcher doesn’t include a city name or "near me” in their search.