With the internet, businesses can reach far beyond the reach of old-fashioned marketing with less money. But before going far beyond, businesses should see how it can perform locally. Businesses today are overwhelmed by the variety of available local marketing choices.
With many choices available, most business owners don't know where to start.
Internet marketing is the spearhead of any business on the internet. The first thing to do is to build a strong foundation for local search is by starting from the basics. From there, business owners can take advantage of other opportunities, including paid media, to generate even greater visibility for their brand.
Accurate and Accessible Information
Before conducting any local search marketing campaign, the first thing to consider is to ensure your business' information is accurate, accessible, and consistent throughout the web. consistent, accurate and accessible throughout the web. If your business information is outdated or inconsistent, potential visitors would face difficulties in finding your. No only it will lower your visibility in search, inaccurate and inaccessible business information will also make your business far from professional.
Populate Top Local Business Listings
Once your basic information on local search platforms is accurate and consistent, you can then build your listings on the most popular sites to include additional information that potential customers are looking for.
Building out a listing can be easy, but it is time consuming. You can have it as a ongoing work on progress as you venture to the next step.
Your Website and User Experience
For your business to have an online presence, it must first have a business website. A business website is the leading component of any business' local marketing strategy. Your business website is the "base" of all activities you are going to do on the web. It's essentially the most crucial digital interaction your business begins and ends.
As the place for existing and potential customers to learn about your company, you must invest sufficient funds, efforts and time to develop a contemporary, appealing, and easy-to-use website. This includes using a visually appealing color scheme and attractive visual content, as well as incorporating straightforward navigation.
A user's experience on your business website should be similar to the experience you want customers to have with your business overall. Outdated information, dead links and poorly designed websites are never acceptable.
Optimize Your Website
Good things are useless unless they are seen. You can create an attractive and informative website with many engaging features, but if no one sees it, what good does it do? When building a great business website, keep in mind that many potential customers won't see your work if they can't find it. Optimizing your website for SEO should go side-by-side with building an effective website.
The basics of SEO for boosting you website's visibility on the web include, and not limited to, the following:
- A title that goes beyond your business name.
- Individual pages for each business location as well as each product or service your business offers.
- Effectively apply keywords and phrasing that potential customers are most likely to use.
Start A Blog
One of the easiest way to build your website's local search visibility is to start a blog. By having updated contents, your website will provide a steady stream of new and relevant information, and this in turn can attract people to visit your website.
A blog can be featured your website homepage as well as promoted in your business' social media channels. Blog can be a great way for your business to provide your thoughts about your industry and highlight new business offerings.
Fresh and compelling contents will also raise your site's SEO, and provide an ongoing strategy to drive traffic from the internet to your website.
Leverage Visual Content
Text can deliver a message. But images, videos and other visual contents, can deliver the same message in a way that it seems more attractive and engaging. In the age where Instagram and Pinterest come to play, visual content plays an important role in attracting potential customers.
Consumers on the internet are more attracted to photos, and are more engaged with videos that demonstrate a brand's authenticity and value. Both photos and videos also help to boost website SEO and improve visibility for local listings.
Mobile Friendly Website
Internet on PC is like yesterday's trend. Although there are still many people that access the internet from their desktop computers, the numbers don't match the massive increase of mobile users. Having a website that is not mobile friendly is one of the biggest mistake your business can do online.
Local mobile searches are not only on the rise, but many of them end in a purchase. If a customer that attempts to access your website from their mobile device but is confused by the layout, sizing issues, pages not loading, inability to access information, and so forth, they are more likely to return to previous pages and conduct further searches that exclude your website. And other websites they will visit are more likely your competitors.
To create a mobile friendly website, you can start by conducting a mobile audit of your current website to determine the types of mobile consumers that are visiting your website, and what they're looking for when they access your site. Then work with that template to create a slimmed version for your mobile website to highlight the most important information that matters to your potential customers, delivered in an easy viewable format.
Social Media Engagement
Social media is already a massive trend today. The network provides many ways for users to share their thoughts and experience for the world to see. Social media for business provides a way to keep in direct, ongoing contact with your customers about new offerings, promotions and so forth.
Profiles on Facebook, Twitter and others are ranked high on search engines. And they can also create backlink to your website, boosting your website's visibility on the internet.
Choosing which social media channels to use can be difficult at the beginning. You can choose the ones that makes the most sense to your business based on the type of content you are going to share.
With social media presence, you can share your contents for your followers to see. People do not visit business websites that often, but usually they do visit their favorite social media sites more than they need to. Create an editorial calendar for what content you want to post and the time it will be posted. You can share promotions, giveaways, photos, announcement, blog updates, etc. to you social posts.
Always use your social posts to link to your business website to drive traffic. And always engage with users directly about their questions or concerns.
While you have no control of who can follow you on social media, targeting users base on their interests, geographical area and specific demography, can narrow your social media profiles more appealing to local searches before going nationally, or internationally.
Since social media has a massive reach, it can also be a way for you to 'eavesdrop' and gather as much information as possible so that you can make good, strategic business decisions.
Encourage Reviews and Testimonials
Everyone on the internet can be your visitor. With more and more businesses are available on the internet, choosing the best one out for a specific reason can be a problem for most people. People are increasingly aware that listening to others can benefit them, and on the web, online reviews are becoming the critical role that can affect customer's purchasing decision.
Online reviews include, and not limited to, quantity and quality of your offerings. Online reviews can also be a mean to influence how your business appears in local listing results. You can encourage customers who had positive experience with your business to leave reviews by asking them nicely.