Hong Kong SEO: Why is It Important for Your Business
Have you ever wondered how manage to appear in local search engine searches? Discover how to attract more customers and stand out from competitors in your region with Local SEO strategies.
Hong Kong is 1.5 times bigger than Singapore and the 8th most densely populated city in the world. Don’t you worry about public transportation, it’s super convenient and you can basically hop on the MTR train or a tram to explore the 50 incredible things to do in Hong Kong right now.
Earlier in 2020, 72% of Hongkongers are looking forward to shopping for pleasure after the pandemic subsides. With all the ease of public transportation and now – the 2nd phase of HK$5,000 consumption vouchers released recently, you can really expect a lot of foot traffic offline to boost the local economy. Hence, local SEO is becoming more important.
Local SEO is a set of optimization tactics for your shop and store to appear in Google searches. Through them, your company can become a reference in your locality and will gain more and more customers.
According to some surveys, 46% of all Google searches look for local information. Therefore, it is clear that there is a significant percentage of users interested in local searches, especially looking for the store location. They are the ones that can help you achieve good positioning in organic results.
Without a doubt, Local SEO is a great opportunity for your company to have more visibility, generate traffic, and attract more customers to your physical store.
Thinking about helping you improve your business results in Hong Kong, we created this article with everything you need to know about Hong Kong SEO and how to apply this strategy in your favor. Read on!
What is Hong Kong SEO?
Hong Kong SEO is a set of optimization strategies that, like traditional SEO, are aimed at optimizing websites for search engines. The difference is that in Local SEO this optimization is done for searches in Hong Kong.
When the user searches for restaurants, bakeries, cinemas, theaters, or others, Google understands that the person may be looking for establishments near their location. Users can also do a search for “restaurants near me”, which will result in the search engine filtering the user’s actual location to display results that meet their needs.
This also happens when a search is performed outside of the user’s city or region of origin. Suppose you live in NYC, Say for example you are our staff at our BMG Causeway Bay office, while you decide to have a mid-day break and find a coffee shop. Google will display the best coffee shops, which in this case is NOC Coffee at Lee Gardens Three in your proximity without necessarily having to enter where you are.
Usually, these types of searches are performed using a mobile phone, making it easier for the search engine to identify your current location.
Another essential point in Local SEO is having a responsive website that adapts to any mobile device. After all, mobile searches are on the rise and mobile users tend to benefit more from location recommendations.
How to do Local SEO for companies?
To do local SEO it is necessary to adopt some optimization strategies, just like any traditional SEO strategy.
In addition to adopting SEO tactics, it is necessary to focus on marketing, which is the union of geolocation with the company’s advertising planning.
For this, you can use some resources to brand your company in your region or even in another location where you believe you can reach more customers.
We are talking about Google My Business, which gives you the possibility to include information about your establishment. It is through it that the search will remove the local data to be displayed on the SERP (results pages).
Local SEO Strategies
Find out in this topic the best methods of how to do local SEO so that your business thrives in the region in which it is located:
Google My Business
It is a free tool that Google makes available for your business to be displayed in local recommendations and in other Google tools, such as Google Maps and on the Google results page.
It is possible to register the services that the company offers and include the area of operation.
Another advantage of Google My Business is that it has the Google Post function, which allows you to include posts about the company, similar to what happens on social networks. You can leverage your Facebook post content and put them there!
If you organize an event or some promotion, for example, these publications will be presented to the user when he searches for your company or is near it.
It is important to keep the address up to date. To find out if the address really belongs to you, Google sends you a letter with the confirmation code to validate your account.
In addition, the platform sends a monthly report to your email regarding searches related to your brand and access to photos published within Google My Business. Thus, you can have more complete data on your company’s status in Google searches.
Importance of NAP
NAP is the acronym for name, address, and phone number. When it comes to local SEO, this information is the most important and needs to come before anything else.
After that, you should focus on posting photos of the place, products, describing your services, and producing quality content that catches the audience’s attention.
It is extremely important that your company has a website. After all, before going to a store, most people look for information on the internet about the reviews and quality of the company’s products or services.
So that you are always one step ahead of your competitors, keep all data and information about your establishment up to date.
Google Maps
We use this platform whenever we need to search for an address quickly. Through Google Maps, we can identify the distance from a certain location and even see suggested routes.
As mentioned above, it is through Google My Business that your company can appear on Google Maps. With these two platforms, your organic results in local searches will be much higher.
How about knowing the most important information to be linked on Google Maps? See below:
Fill in the site field in Google My Business;
Enter the full address;
Add opening hours;
Enter the phone number;
Add the events your company organizes;
Add photos of the location;
Encourage your business reviews and ratings;
Add a description to let users know your company briefly.
Extra: When there are holidays in the month, Google sends you an email to find out if you want to change the opening hours. So, pay attention to the messages!
All of the criteria we’ve scored here are essential to optimizing your business’s local searches and gaining an ever-increasing number of leads.
Snippets for local business
First of all, let’s ask you a question: Do you know what a snippet is? Don’t worry if you don’t know, as we’ll briefly explain what this is all about.
The Snippets or Featured Snippets are also known as the Google zero position and are those answers boxes that appear in the top results of searches.
Snippet’s main objective is to answer users’ questions quickly and objectively, without having to access the page.
Now that you know what a Snippet is, it’s time to understand how important it is to your local business search.
To find out if your site is relevant to appear in a snippet, Google analyzes the content of your pages, collects information, and checks whether the data found is useful to the user.
With the help of Google My Business and with the company information that is added to the platform, you will have more chances to appear at the top of Google, improving your website’s positioning and increasing your company’s authority in the search engine.
Thus, it is extremely important to pay attention to the type of search that users are doing in your region so that you do not fall behind your competitors.
Local Keyword Research
When we want to find an establishment in some location, we do a search putting the city we want next to what we are looking for.
For example: “ digital marketing agency in Hong Kong”. Sometimes, we can be even more specific by searching by neighborhood rather than the city.
If you own a local business and produce content, using local keyword research is a great option to know how to stand out in your region.
One tactic that can help you get more results is to do a search for terms related to locations in cities near you to understand how users are searching. Then you just apply it to your content strategies.
An important tip is to always choose long tails as we saw in the example of the digital marketing agency. The more specific the word, the easier it is to rank and appear in Google My Business results.
In addition, it is important to create a content marketing strategy focused on topics related to your region.
Content Types for Local Searches
We’ve already mentioned that you should do keyword research and invest in content production. But what types of content should be produced?
It all depends on your business model. You need to produce content relevant to your niche and your location. A restaurant can address topics such as regional cuisine, for example.
A blog can talk about any local topic as long as it makes sense for your business. The example we gave about the inn can help someone who wants to open a tourism agency in that region.
Another example: a children’s store that has a blog can provide baby room decorating tips and refer you to other local furniture and home decor stores. The blog can cover topics such as motherhood, make lists with everything a baby needs, or tips for first-time mothers.
You can also do interviews with local experts, who will talk about the most authoritative subjects. In this way, you will become a reference for customers or target audiences in your region. Don’t forget to use strategic keywords so that your site is well ranked in search engines.
Benefits of Hong Kong SEO
We need to illustrate which Hong Kong SEO benefits are most relevant to businesses with a physical sales location.
Although people make many purchases through e-commerce, they do not stop going to other places such as restaurants, cinemas, theaters, stores, hotels, inns, offices, beauty salons, and more. Here, we will understand the advantages of this strategy for companies that receive their customers physically. Look:
Increased sales
Optimizing your website for Hong Kong SEO will generate a greater number of visits, increasing the possibilities of converting leads for your service or product, as well as attracting customers to your physical establishment, which generates a real increase in revenue.
Online presence
One of the advantages of local SEO for any market segment is boosting its web presence. We know that when people need to get to a location, the first thing they do is look for the address in apps.
So, if you correctly use the strategies that have already been mentioned in this article, your chances of appearing in organic results will certainly be much higher.
Attract new audiences
With Hong Kong SEO it is possible to gain new customers who did not know your business. Advertising your company on Google My Business assertively with all the correct information makes it possible for people who are close to your company to find you more easily.
And then did you like what you learned in this article? We hope you wrote down all the tips because with them you can breathe new life into your business. Feel free to contact us for more tips.