With Google rolling out new and improved updates to its algorithm, local digital marketing quickly evolved into an ecosystem of brand promotion and traffic generation.
Up until a few years back, a Google search for a gardener listed results for the top 10 gardeners from all over the world, irrespective of the location you performed the search from. Obviously, a gardener from a different country, no matter how qualified he is, cannot be expected to travel across the globe to provide his services.
Fortunately, Google’s algorithm changes have done away with this problem. Today, location plays a major role in search results. With advanced features like maps to locate businesses easily, brands are now fighting for their places under the sun. Local digital marketing has turned out to be a crucial way of getting spotted easily. So, you need to get your strategies straight.
- Create and Maintain Local Business Pages
Setting up local business pages on your brand’s social media profiles is important to optimize your business for local search. When users search for the services your business provides, the local pages will immediately pop up, depending on the geographical location of the searchers. This will boost the chances of them landing on your page, exponentially.
The next step is to maintain these pages on a regular basis. You should update these pages daily and monitor their performance closely. This will give you an idea about how to improve their search result rankings.
- Build Local Citations
Citations are mentions of your business’s details like name, phone numbers, address etc. on web-pages that may not have any link to your business. For example, your business listing on an online yellow page directory is a citation. These citations indicate that your business is consistent and that the contact information provided isn’t fake.
Google takes these citations very seriously. An abundance of such citations notifies Google of the prominence and the legitimacy of your business.
If your business has citations on well-indexed and good quality portals, chances of your website showing up ahead of your competition in the search engine results page are quite high. The higher the number of quality citations, the better will be the rank of your business’s website.
- Use Locally Optimized Keywords
Your local digital marketing strategy should include choosing keywords that are specific to not only your business, but also the location. For this, you would need to identify the common search terms that people use in a certain area to locate businesses like yours. Usually, the rule of thumb is to incorporate city names in keywords to optimize localized search results.
What works is, experimenting with a variety of keyword combinations to identify which draws the most traffic and engagement.
- Ensure That Your Website Has a Responsive Design
Mobile devices have swamped our daily lives with their presence and significance. It has been found in 2015 itself that that over 100 billion Google searches are conducted from mobile devices with screen sizes of six inches or less!
Standing in 2020, we can say that the number has grown considerably in the last 5 years.
Additionally, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, chances of it showing up in search results are pretty slim. This means that it will be falling short of the immense traffic that mobile search has been drawing. So you need to make sure that your website has a responsive design and can be reached easily through a mobile search.
- Implement Targeted Marketing Strategies
It is important to devise marketing strategies that are locally optimized to expand your reach. This will help you gain the right audience. Whichever online platforms you decide to advertise on, targeting is absolutely crucial to reap the advantages.
It is important to employ your business’s targeting capabilities and resources to reach out to the local customers. If you do this right, you will be utilizing the maximum part of your budget on those people whose requirements resonate the most with the services and/or products your business provides. Such focused local targeting will attract more consumers than you can estimate.
- Leverage the use of call-only ads
If you are a local business driving sales primarily through phone calls, call-only ads can be a lifesaver.
Call-only ads allow you to avoid the use of a landing page. If you lack the budget for a landing page or a professional Google ads team, call-only ads give you the freedom to connect with your customers only via calls.
There’s a problem though. You may expect to get some irrelevant phone calls – so try to ensure your ad copy is right up to the mark.
- Use Facebook ad targeting to your benefits
The greatest strength of Facebook ad is the granularity with which marketers can target their ads.
Facebook gives marketers the freedom to target their ads using almost every aspect of an individual’s life as a parameter, including age, demographic data, life events such as having a child or getting married, etc.
These parameters can again be combined with location targeting. This allows marketers to gain an incredible control over their local social media marketing campaigns.
- You can use store-front images of your physical location in your ads
If you are a local business relying mainly on foot traffic, your goal should be to create a correlation between your physical location and online business.
Textual copies like “swing by” can be quite catchy, but nothing can beat an actual photo of your store front. Use it to your advantage.
Local dominance does not happen overnight. It takes time and effort to make this a complete success. A part of the strategies also includes tracking progress and monitoring what’s working and what’s not. Depending on this, you would need to tweak your techniques to make the most of local digital marketing for your business.
With that, we will bring this article to a close. Hope you had a good read.
