Local digital marketing is a good way to put your business front and centre for customers looking for similar products and services in the area. Today’s buyer will first research the Internet before doing most of their shopping, including walking into physical stores. Most people start searching on their mobile devices and will likely enter a store within a few minutes or hours of a search, which is why you need to ramp up your local digital marketing efforts if you haven’t already. Here are some steps to help you create a winning local digital marketing strategy:
Make Sure You’re Listed On Google My Business
If you want to start somewhere, it’s getting listed on Google My Business because most users start a Google search before walking into any store. Consider the following:
- Register your business on both Google My Business and Bing Places.
- Make sure your listing contains important contact information like email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, and operational hours.
- Add a map to your listing so people find it easier to locate your store without any trouble.
- Get as many reviews as possible for your Google listing because customers tend to get influenced by recommendations online. The more positive reviews you receive, the more Google will view your business positively and push up your listing.
- Add content regularly in the ‘Posts’ section so help make your business stay relevant and up to date.
- Add photos as much as possible so people can resonate with your products and services through imagery.
Registering your business on Google My Business and Bing Places is just one step, but you must keep your information up to date to avoid frustrating people genuinely interested in your products and services.
Manage Mentions Of Your Business To Make Sure Everything Is Accurate
If your business is mentioned on multiple websites, you need to make sure every one of them is accurate for Google to view your business positively. Consider the following:
- Manage all mentions of your business to make sure information is accurate, as this will affect your local digital marketing.
- Look at local business directories, social media platforms and third-party websites and correct any information that is wrongly presented for your business.
- The more accurate the information is, the better will be your ranking in Google search results.
- Avoid splashing your business details on low quality directories because that may do more harm than good.
Businesses may be mentioned on different online directories and yellow pages. Wrong information will frustrate readers and shows Google that you’re not properly managing your information, which in turn will hurt your local digital marketing efforts. When the search engine discovers your business information is accurate and valuable to people, it will assign more authority to your local listing.
Do Proper Keyword Research
Local digital marketing has never been more important than it is today when you consider how often people pick up their devices to search for businesses that provide specific products and services near them. If you do B2B marketing it is important to target businesses rather than individuals. Make sure that you tailor and implement a few B2B marketing strategies. By doing this, you will know which one works better for your business.
For keyword research, a good way to optimize for local digital marketing is to do proper keyword research. Consider the following:
- Select the right keywords relevant to your business by identifying search terms that will result in attracting the best quality visitors to your site.
- Check different keyword research tools to identify the most commonly used phrases related to businesses in your category.
- Once you choose the best keywords for your business, you need to make sure your website is properly optimized with naturally written content.
- The keyword should appear in the meta description, title tags, page content and header tags for proper optimization.
- Avoid spamming content with the keyword too many times as this will diminish value to the reader and push down your rankings in time.
Keywords play a big role in your overall local digital marketing efforts so make sure you get this right for the best results.
Use these easy tips to increase traffic for your website from local sources. Keep in mind that local digital marketing doesn’t always show signs of success overnight. It may take time for search engines to reward high-quality websites, but it will happen if you’re consistent.
Tina Johnson helped bring The Marketing Folks from a-weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. She continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a contributor to The Marketing Folks, Tara mainly covers industry new.