Targeting any SERP in search engines can be a time-consuming and difficult process. With ample competition virtually everywhere, it can take weeks, months or even years to rise the ranks of search results and be visible to the masses. Ultimately, local SEO has become increasingly favored by brands wishing to factor more prominently in search results – even if that means smaller audiences overall. In order to get the best return on your local SEO investment, you need to have a game plan. Below, we’ll walk you through the steps of making this happen and ensure that you know what needs to be done to get the most bang for your buck.

Mastering the Basics of Calculation

Before you can get the best returns on your local SEO investments, you must first know a few things. When pinging links and content to people via search engines, you want to know about 4 variables. The first is how many people are searching for the terms you’re targeting. Next, you’ll want to know how many people searching for these terms are actually becoming visitors. After that, you’ll calculate which visitors actually convert (whether that be through a purchase, subscription, or something else). Lastly, you’ll need to know how much the average conversion is worth to you; this could be the average order amount or a pre-determined value based on obtaining their personal information. These elements will help you determine exactly how much of a return on investment you’re getting.

Target the Trusted

In between people who don’t know of you and those who regularly engage with your brand is a third category of people. A strong focus on this middle group – people who maybe visited your website once before or made a one-time purchase – can deliver maximum return on investment in many cases. Rather than targeting those who regularly give you their business already or targeting people who have never heard of you, retargeting those who have demonstrated prior interest can yield maximum results. Since they have already demonstrated interest in your brand, the ROI in aiming paid campaigns and other aspects of local SEO at them produces the most effective results.

Flesh Out Your Content

Whether you’re targeting people organically in local SERPs or sending them to a landing page via paid campaigns, you need quality content to maximize return on investment. If you’re tantalizing people to click on your links in SERPs and beyond – but fail to deliver any meaningful content once they’re there – then you’ve just wasted time and/or money without gaining anything meaningful. All of your content should be contextually relevant to the ad copy, title and any other elements visible to search engine users. A click is worthless if it doesn’t result in a conversion, so be sure that you’re not wasting ad budgets or inflating your bounce rate by pinging links people don’t want to see.

Improving local SEO takes time and patience, but it can produce ample rewards. When investing both time and money into local SEO, you want to generate the maximum ROI possible. By providing relevant content in your links and ads, targeting those who are most likely to resonate with that content and knowing how to calculate your ROI in the first place, you’ll be substantially rewarded.