How Businesses Can Leverage Local Search Marketing

To say local search marketing is essential nowadays is not an overstatement. But how can small businesses easily leverage local search marketing?

Nowadays, businesses are operating in a competitive market which makes it difficult for small businesses to favourably compete with limited resources.

So how do you ensure people get to see or know about your business? You will have to do more if you want to get your business in front of potential local customers.

Local search marketing is one of the best means of getting people to see your business. It is arguably the easiest means to get your business in front of your potential local customers.

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How to leverage local search marketing

As a local business, your primary catchment area is your neighbourhood. This is because you wouldn’t expect people that live miles away from your business to patronise you.

Even if they do, the cost of delivering your services or products to them may be too high for you. This is why your primary target should be your immediate environment and this is where local search marketing becomes a necessity.

So, how do you enhance your business local search and online advertising? As the internet continues to be a primary source of information, increasing online visibility remains an important objective for every business.

The fact is that search engines have witnessed unparalleled levels of improvement. Nowadays, search engine results are highly personalised to show exact information tailored to a user’s specific location.

This makes it highly valuable for local businesses to provide accurate and easily accessible information to consumers. Below are some of the best ways you can improve your business’s local search marketing efforts:

#1]. Target segmentation is important

As a local business owner, the first thing to do is to segment your market. You have to define your target to get more from local search marketing.

This is one of the online smart marketing tips for small business owners. If you don’t know, this is what will enable you to segment your paid search campaigns.

Many businesses operate at a local level as well as a regional, national, or even an international level. If your business has an interest in attracting customers locally, keep your paid search campaigns local.

Also, if you want to go regional and on a large scale, it is advisable to keep paid search campaigns separate. This means you shouldn’t try to be too smart by using one paid search campaign to attract customers in different market segments. And don’t forget to show physical location, phone number, and map links on your ads.

#2]. Keywords matter

A keyword is one of the most important aspects of search engine marketing. This is why you should ensure that the keywords used on your business website are included on review pages, local listing profiles, social media profiles and any other sites on which your business has a presence.

This will help you to reinforce your SEO efforts and keep information about your business consistent across the web, and this will help to easily make keywords work for you.

Also, website content for local businesses should also be optimised for location-specific keywords and phrases.

Add specific long-tail key phrases that include details about the business’s location and location-specific branded key phrases to the website and any shared content.

#3]. Let search engines know your location

It’s important to let the search engines know your business’s physical location. This is what the search engines will consider when people search for your business.

You should inform search engines where your local business is located and what areas it serves. If your business website doesn’t have one already, create a footer that includes the business name, address, and coverage areas at the bottom of every webpage.

This will help the search engines to serve your site to users searching for or within your areas. Use “schema markup” to ensure that it’s recognised properly by engines.

A local business name and address should also be specified on the business’s social media profiles or pages. The more detail you can provide about the business, the better.

Properly optimised images should be added to profiles that allow them. Also, information about hours, closings, and specialities should be available on all profiles associated with the location.

#4]. Put your contacts on local listings

Local listing pages or third-party sites such as Yelp or Google Reviews often feature local businesses, with or without the business’s consent.

The URL on such pages should point back to a contact or other page specific to the location being reviewed to reinforce relevance.

For businesses with multiple locations, this can help mitigate potential confusion. Also, it can help guard against one location suffering because of another location’s poor reviews.

Additionally, you should take some time to search for duplicate profiles across third-party websites. You should aware that sometimes listings or profiles are generated because they are associated with a particular email address or another identifying element.

If possible, remove duplicate profiles. Also, ensure that consumers are being directed to the profiles you own and manage. And if your business is not featured on local listings or other sites that offer information about local businesses, create a presence that includes all the correct details.

It’s important to have a presence on such sites and to make sure the details are accurate, as search engines frequently crawl such sites to collect information — accuracy and consistency in these areas can help boost SEO.

#5]. Online reviews also matter

It’s important to encourage customers to leave reviews for your business. This will help present your brand in a positive light when prospects are looking for information.

According to Google, customers and businesses both benefit from customer reviews. As a matter of fact, online reviews are often the first sources consumers come across when searching for information about a local business.

Even if people leave bad (negative) reviews about your business, never attempt to delete them. What you should do instead is to respond positively to bad reviews in order to be able to win the reviewers back.