Internet Marketing Essentials for Local Businesses

How do you market a local business online?
Source: Flickr

The internet is the most popular means through which consumers find out about local businesses. Including it in your overall marketing plan can help you get easy exposure to a large audience at a low cost. 

But then, you will also need to take care to reach out to your local audience. As a local business, a broader exposure might not help you with your sales.

Why local internet marketing?

Consumers prefer local businesses for products and services. Dealing with local businesses greatly reduces their costs such as shipping, and logistics. But consumers often find it hard to locate local businesses. As a result, they rely on search engines to help them out.

In order to find more clients/customers for your local business, you must make sure that the search engines known where you are located. Optimizing your site for such search queries is the ideal method to get yourself noticed. 

Other than this, a local internet marketing strategy can also help you gain a competitive edge for search results. It is quite difficult to rank higher for generic keywords but at the same time, ranking higher with a geolocator might not be as difficult simply because there are a less number of service providers that concentrate on specific locations.

Here's a thing or two that you can do to get started with local internet marketing.

1) Sign up for Google Places

If you are trying to improve you local internet marketing, then Google Places should be your first stop. Google Places helps local businesses claim their addresses on Google Maps. 

These results often show up whenever a search query pertaining to your business and locality is being searched. Since Google is the world's most preferred search engine, it is definitely worth trying out its options for local search and taking advantage of its vast resources.

2) Mobile friendly is local friendly

A majority of local searches take place via smartphones. This is because people want to quickly find out what interesting places are near them when on the move. So maintaining a mobile friendly site can help tremendously. 

If your content is not optimized for mobile phones, there is a good chance that not many people would read it for long. 

Also Google tends to favour those sites that are mobile friendly whenever a person conducts searches from his/her smartphone. This is yet another reason to make your small business website design mobile friendly.

3) Website optimization

Optimize your website specially for local search. 

• Use some location indicators in your content. 
• Couple the keywords with your location to generate more interest. 
• Include a Google map on your site. 
• Use your off-page optimization efforts to enhance local marketing. 
• Place keywords coupled with location indicators in anchor links to your site. 
• Don't forget to get listed on all the local business directories.

4) Key local influencers 

It also makes sense to identify the different key influencers in your sector and area. Think other businesses, organisations, charities, educational institutions, and the local press. 

Once you’ve targeted them, you can build relationships with them and leverage this to augment your local online marketing efforts/campaign.