Local SEO: Search Engine Optimization is abbreviated as SEO.

Local SEO is doing search engine optimization in a particular area – a local area.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process and actions of improving your website rank. Your rank or position is literally where you are listed on the page returned after someone searches for a relevant keyword. Increasing your rank can increase your traffic from the organic search results (SERPS) provided by the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, and Bing (MSN).

The promise of proper SEO is that it can get you into one of the hallowed top 3 positions, which get somewhere around 60% of all clicks. Clicks bring people to your website, and assuming (a big assumption…) that your website converts that traffic into customers, clicks mean more business.

Now, the real truth is that for globally competitive search terms; where you are competing with perhaps millions of other sites, getting a top 3 position is a long term task. As an example, let's pick a popular term like "diamonds." Google reports 51,000,000 websites are "about" diamonds. The top rated site is diamonds.com.

The competition for this search term is fierce! There are many, large companies that have whole teams of SEO experts working diligently on improving their search results. The reality is that, without the serious resources required, you simply cannot rank for this term.

Okay, but what about this Local SEO stuff?

Local SEO is about optimizing for local searches. That involves qualifying a search with a local term – continuing our example it would be "diamonds vancouver."

To compare, this local search has 1,040,000 competing websites. However, this comparison doesn't tell the whole story. Digging down into the results shows that, after the first page, there are numerous sites in the results that are… less relevant. There are far fewer competing websites, and the quality of those websites is lower. The competition is far, far less.

Ultimately for now, optimizing for Local Search makes it possible to get top 3 positioning for many search terms. This will not be the case in 2-5 years.

Combining the fact that people are searching for business information more and more; and that leads to more business for local businesses where there isn't as much SEO competition; means that this is the ideal time to start to optimize your website and lock in a top position.