Local SEO is a powerful strategy for small businesses looking to attract nearby customers, but it's not without its difficulties. While the benefits of showing up in local search results and the Google Maps pack are clear, the path to achieving and maintaining high local rankings can be challenging, especially when time and resources are already stretched thin for most small business owners.
Let's explore some of the main hurdles that make effective local SEO hard for small to medium-sized businesses.
Core Issues Making Local SEO Difficult for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
Several fundamental issues contribute to the complexity of local SEO for SMBs:
- Intense Competition: In many cities and industries, the local search landscape is highly competitive. Multiple local businesses are vying for the same keywords, and you're often competing not just with direct local competitors but also with national chains that have significant online authority and are trying to capture local search traffic. This is particularly true in sectors like healthcare and wellness, where many practices are competing for visibility.
- Lack of Expertise: Effective local SEO requires a specific skillset. Many small business owners and their teams may not have the technical know-how to properly optimize online listings, identify and fix technical issues on their website, troubleshoot ranking problems, or create the type of localized content that resonates with both search engines and local customers. Without this expertise, it's easy to execute a subpar strategy.
- Limited Resources: Most small businesses operate with lean teams and tight budgets. They often lack a dedicated marketing team or even a specific SEO budget. Owners are typically wearing multiple hats, making it incredibly difficult to stay consistent with the ongoing tasks required for successful local SEO. This lack of resources is a significant barrier to doing local SEO right, or at least doing it consistently.
Technical Challenges in Executing Local SEO
Beyond the core issues, several technical aspects of local SEO can be challenging for small businesses:
- Website and Schema Markup: Your website is a critical component of local SEO. Schema markup, a type of code that helps Google understand your services and business information, is particularly important for local visibility. However, implementing schema correctly can be tricky without technical help. Websites built without SEO optimization in mind may lack the proper code needed for Google to efficiently understand and rank them locally.
- Understanding and Acting on Data: Knowing if your local SEO efforts are working requires tracking key metrics. But even if you can track your performance, knowing what to do with that data is another story. Should you change your service pages? Create more localized content? Update your business category on Google Business Profile? It's hard to interpret the output from local SEO analytics and make informed decisions about your strategy.
- Mobile-Friendliness: A significant portion of local searches happen on mobile devices, with many users starting their search directly in Google Maps. If your website is not fast, clean, and mobile-friendly with easy navigation, Google is likely to push you down in the mobile search results. This poor mobile experience will frustrate potential customers and cost you valuable leads. It's worth testing your own website on your phone to see how easy it is for a potential customer or patient to book an appointment or contact you.
The Significant Time Commitment of Local SEO
One of the most significant reasons why many small businesses, particularly in the healthcare and wellness space, struggle with local SEO is the time it requires.
- Initial Setup: Getting your local SEO set up correctly takes a considerable amount of time. This includes optimizing your Google Business Profile, conducting a thorough audit of your online presence, creating initial local content, building citations across directories, setting up a system for managing reviews, and configuring performance tracking tools. This initial phase can easily require 20 to 40 hours of dedicated effort.
- Ongoing Management: Local SEO is not a one-time task. Maintaining and improving your local rankings requires consistent ongoing effort. This involves dedicating typically 5 to 10 hours per week to tasks like updating content, responding to reviews, posting photos and updates to your Google Business Profile, checking performance reports, and making necessary adjustments to your strategy. For a small business owner already juggling numerous responsibilities, finding this time consistently is a major challenge.
Common Local SEO Mistakes to Avoid
Understanding the challenges also highlights common mistakes small businesses make that can hinder their local SEO success. These include:
- Having inconsistent Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) information across various online platforms and directories.
- Maintaining incomplete or outdated Google Business Profiles.
- Ignoring patient or customer reviews or not responding to them professionally.
- Having a website with poor mobile optimization, creating a bad customer experience.
- Possessing little or no localized content on their website, even if they have general service pages.
- Exhibiting poor citation hygiene or management, resulting in missing or duplicate business listings.
While these challenges and mistakes are common, the good news is that they are fixable. Effective local SEO requires consistent effort, the right expertise, and a commitment to addressing both technical and content-related factors.
Want to level up your SEO? Check out our Local SEO Guide for Healthcare and Wellness Entrepreneurs.
