Local Marketing – Top 5 tips with links and explanations
Before we start
There are 2 types of local marketing and SEO in my opinion:
- If your business mainly relies on local customers. For example, locksmith, café, bar, dry cleaner and joiner.
- If your business mainly relies of non local customers with a local requirement. For example hotels, training centres, wedding venues and team building businesses.
Which area do you fall into?
Understanding your search ranking for local SEO is still important. If you are not using a paid tool then this free too might be useful https://www.whatsmyserp.com/serpcheck.php
5 TOP LOCAL MARKETING TIPS
ON PAGE SEO
You MUST get your web site as well optimised as possible. Without this any efforts or expense incurred in getting people to your site will be wasted.
Do some keyword research using the Google Keyword Planner.
Make sure every page on your web site has a relevant, keyword focussed and correctly formatted title, description, heading1, (and heading2s), and good or great content.
NAP CONSISTENCY
NAP simple means Name, Address, Phone number. These need to be the same across your business listings in Directories, Camber sites, Other web sites, FSB listing, Associations, etc.
We know finding all your NAPs is hard so we offer a service (£40 one time charge) that will locate all your online NAPs and give you a comprehensive list with links so you can check them and make the changes yourself. We also offer to create new NAPs to grow your local marketing presence.
LOCAL
Make sure your business is listed on the three main local search engines.
Google Business Pages – https://www.google.co.uk/business/
Yahoo Local (Infoserve) – http://help.yahoo.com/l/uk/yahoo/local/localsearching/localsearching-201107.html
Bing Local – https://www.bingplaces.com/
REVIEWS
Trust in your business is the best possible sales tool, so get some reviews. Try not to use your own site with testimonials but if you do try and include a name and photo. The best option is to ask your clients to leave you a review on a 3rd party service.
Google Business pages have a review area. If you can get 6 reviews here you will be leading the pack in most cases and it will make a big difference to your listing.
I use a 3rd party product called LouderVoice (£240 a year) which I can install on your site. If you search for your business name followed by the word “reviews” and see what comes up this will give you an idea as to what you have online.
There are many other 3rd party reviews system and prices vary, some are Trustpilot, Reevoo, Trusted Reviews, etc.
WHY IS SOCIAL MEDIA NOT ON YOUR LIST?
Good question. The reason is simple. Social media done well is a great contributor to local marketing but in my experience only a few percent of businesses do this well. The simple reason few of us do this well is that it’s very time consuming and needs considerable commitment. Done poorly social is pointless, and can even be counter productive.
I have tried to focus on areas that are relatively easy and don’t require huge ongoing commitment hence I left out social.
OTHER RESOURCES
Excellent local marketing analysis from 2013 but still relevant today
http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
OTHER AREAS TO LOOK AT
Social, Inbound links, Structured data, Blogging, Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
