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Published October 05th, 2016 by

SEO Marketing – The Secret Weapon of Local Businesses

SEO Marketing - The Secret Weapon of Local Businesses

Marketing is the heart of any business making small start-up grow and become profitable. While great products or service,are of course necessary, they become useless when people don’t get to hear about them. The first step to do is to always find ways to spread word about your business.

There are various types of marketing strategies to promote your brand, including celebrity advertisements and event marketing. Products are brought to consumers’ attention by putting it on the spotlight,making these easily noticeable or identifiable. These types of marketing works well but need a considerable investment. Hiring celebrities to endorse your product costs a lot. Planning an event creates a hype of your business but may peter out after some time.

According to Marketing-Schools.org, an online resource for marketing education, planning a strategy starts with deciding on your audience. For a local business like yours, that means people within your area. For a cost-efficient marketing strategy, utilize your website to generate customers and interact with existing ones. This is where SEO comes in.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), according to SEO Explained Simply, an online resource for understanding SEO, is getting your website to show on the first page of search engine results page (SERP). You can achieve this by enhancing different elements on your site for it to be recognized by search engines, like Google or Ask, as a relevant result for customers looking for something related to your offer. With over 1.4 million searches done every minute worldwide, you certainly want to have a high ranking on these search engines.

Local SEO marketing is a more specific type of regular SEO,helping you get noticed by folks within your targeted area.

Most consumers now use the internet to search for products or services they need. And these are not limited to just searches done on computers as more and more people launch searches on mobile phones. Now, why is it important for you to be visible to 99% of consumers who use search engines?

According to Business 2 Community, an open community for business professionals, 50% of consumers do a local search end up visiting the store location within the day. This basically means, you are able to convert website traffic to revenue. So, compared to other types of marketing,local business SEO allows you to keep generating customers from your website at minimal costs.

Understanding the Benefits of Local SEO

You can maximize your website with local search SEO simply by enhancing your site and making your business more visible to locals. Here are few benefits you can reap with this type of marketing.

  1. Increase in revenue – To make revenues, you need people to buy your product or service. Business 2 Community cites that 18% of mobile searches end with a sale within the day of the search, which is additional revenue of your business.By continuously locating and learning about your business, you expect more revenue from the same marketing strategy repeatedly. Organic search is unpaid, so there is no need to spend more of your marketing budget.
  2. Attract More New Customers – Loyal and repeat customers are great thing to have, however, if you want to grow your business, you need to draw new customers. Local SEO tools make your products or services more visible for consumers whom you have never done business with before. Bright local, a solutions provider with headquarters in East Sussex, reported that 97% of consumers go online when they look for product or service. With the internet taking phone books and local listings, an optimized site can help you win more customers that are new by simply being visible.  For example, if you have bakeshop, people who need birthday cakes will find you and order what they need because they found you when they googled “cakes”.
  3. Maximize Positive Reviews – Word of mouth advertising is a time-tested way in promoting your brand. With the help of local SEO services, you amplify the effects of happy customers on your business. Search Engine Land, an online resource on the search marketing industry, cited that 88% of consumers trust reviews online as much as they recommended from people they know. With such high-trust rating, you turn your satisfied customers into revenue-generating product or service endorsers.
  4. Target the Right Audience – Regular SEO promotes brands to internet users all over the world. So, while it does increase your traffic, it doesn’t necessarily have an impact on your revenue and profit. Local SEO experts recommend enhancing your site to the locals as well. If you have a plumbing business based in Miami, then customers in Orlando won’t hire you for their plumbing needs. This means even if they find your site and they are happy with your rates, they still won’t be able to bring you business. Local SEO makes sure that when there is somebody in your area who needs a plumber and goes online to look for one, you will be on top of their choices.
  5. Stronger and More Recognizable Brand – Strong branding has proven to be very effective marketing tool. Some great examples of these are Xerox and Google. While there are other companies that provide the same service or product, consumers immediately identify brand names that have become synonymous with what they provide. So, when the type of service or product is required, their brands immediately come to mind.

Boost Your Local Business With SEO

There are various ways to enjoy the benefits listed and discussed. Here are some strategies you can use to be more successful with organic searches.

1. Select Keywords That Work – When creating content for your site, use strategic keywords and keyword phrases to improve your ranking. With so much competition from well-established websites, you have to work extra hard to find keywords. You can opt for long-tail or more specific keywords. The best way is to use those that describe what you offer. If you have a bakery business, what type of cakes or bread do you bake? What type of icings do you use?

Once you’ve picked out specific keywords, you can use a research tool to check how often consumers online use these to research. You can use cake, birthday and fondant to make it more specific for your business. For local SEO, you want to add geo-targeted terms, such as your city. So, when a consumer in your area researches online, your bakeshop will be part of the top results.

2. Consistent NAP – NAP stands for name, address and phone number. This information should be consistently available on your site to get good local SEO results. Fifty percent of consumers who do a local search look for information, such as addresses and other contact details. Accurate information is necessary so that search engines can validate your business. While this may seem quite simple, the net is riddled with business citation errors.

3. Link Building Techniques – Top local SEO companies consider links as the most important elements in organic searches. Links act like recommendations from other sites to your business. There are many different ways to get back links to improve your rating. You can have agreements with other businesses to post links on each other’s website for a symbiotic effect. Links to blog sites that do reviews or your local chamber of business are also quality back links that you want on your site.

However, dodgy link building practices, such as linking to a dead page, is dangerous and may have negative consequences on your ranking. Search engines have leveled up their algorithms to ensure that malicious techniques are not used.

4. Local SEO Experts – While optimizing for organic searches may be done on your own, you may want to work with a local SEO expert to get maximum results. You can take advantage of their expertise to work best for your business. In addition, having professionals overseeing your company’s local SEO ensures that it gets the right amount of attention it needs. You can check local SEO services reviews available online to see what type of expert help you can get.

You can turn your local business into a neighborhood of success by ensuring that folks know about you. Discover your options and get started now by checking the list of local SEO agencies on CrowdReviews.com

John Tovar

John specializes in the creation and planning of business-centric mobile applications and mobile website design and development.

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