You can never have enough time to talk about how to leverage the Internet to engage a local audience by utilizing local marketing strategies. UnderstandingMarketing.com can’t underscore enough the importance of having a strong local search marketing and local online marketing strategy. Here are several tips to help any small business with their local area marketing:
Your Website Should Look Clean, Fresh and Inviting
Choose a color scheme that is simple, easy on the eyes and visually compelling. Try not to over do it with lots of colors and patterns that contrast to much. And don’t try to use every single color in your 64 Crayon Box (you know who you are).
Photos are also important in a Web site trying to attract local search marketing. Have images that depict who you are, what you do and what you offer your customers. Have fresh, clean photos of products on any product pages. Find images that visually tell your story and what kind of services you offer. Use iStockPhoto for stock photography (it isn’t free but it can fit every business budget). It also has a wonderfully large inventory of images for virtually every keyword. Remember, simply the way you design your Web site can be a huge factor when doing local area marketing.
Don’t forget pictures of you! People like knowing who they’re doing business with. Develop a well-written “About Us” page that tells visitors some history of you, your company, and any other key players inside the company.
Fresh Content Ties It Together
Once you’ve got the right design for your Web site or blog, now focus on building content that’s fresh, compelling, interactive and engaging. This can definitely be ultra key in your local marketing strategy. Think about your frequency and focus with content. Publish content a few times a week if possible so that you always have some fresh content on your site. Also, make sure that you truly think about who is visiting your site.
Create content that educates and inspires them to learn more about you. If you have a blog, create content that fosters a sense of community on the Web (almost mirroring the local community in which you live). Your blog posts should have a call to action but also invite and encourage people to leave comments so as to keep the conversation going. Think about what you do for your visitors. For a great local marketing strategy always write content that helps visitors learn more about you and your products and services.
Don’t forget to also link to other online resources and blogs (and online resources in your local community). This gives you credibility, continues that theme of community and is also great for search engines. Remember, especially in local online marketing the “Web” is like a spider web where blog posts and online content is all weaved together for the search engines.
Speaking of Search Engines
Continuing from the previous thought, fresh content and linking will always help drive search engine optimization and rankings. Use tools like Google Adwords to identify the most appropriate keywords to embed in all your content and other local marketing strategies. Whether it’s a blog post, a Web page or even a bio in your “About Us” section, always use keywords that help the search engines find you.
Make sure there are no broken links in any of your posts or pages as these interrupt the search engines and make it harder to find you. Place special emphasis on the meta tags and title tags used in all posts and pages. For local area marketing, you may want to consider including the name of your town and nearest metropolitan area in your keyword and title tags so that the local search results can identify you.
In addition to listing your site in the local search sites, like Google Maps and Yahoo!, also try to get inbound links (others linking their site to yours) from other locals. A good way to do this is to get local customers to write testimonials of you and then link to your site (or trade links with local community organizations and the Chamber of Commerce). And don’t forget to register your site on other important local search sites like Citysearch, Yelp and Judy’s Book.
Here are some other great resources on local marketing strategies:
SEO Tips For Any Small Business
Search Engine Optimization Bible
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Great content for small businesses. Well done!
Great post and excellent points on how to build local marketing strategies for small business. I would like to bring to your attention that building Online Reputation Management is also one of an important strategy in online marketing.It is essential to showcase what your company has to offer. Have a page dedicated to your company on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, or better yet, start a blog. Do all of this keeping your target audience in mind.
Most local businesses don’t have any clue about Google AdWords and blog. They spent all their time on their own core businesses. This is where most Internet Marketing companies come to the rescue. However, local businesses tend to pay less and wants to see result before invest more money on paid search links.
Also the most effective ways to acquire local shoppers is to publishing local promotions and local coupons, which is optimized for organic search engine traffic.
The best tool for local business to find out what local shopper are searching is to use Google Trend, which shows the real keywords and keyphrase that is used for organic search result.
SmartLocalShoppers.com is built for that purpose and to help local business pay less and sell more with GEO targeting in the core. Hope the author of this post can include the service as one of the local marketing resources for local businesses.
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