Help customers find your business with local SEO
May 17, 2021
This paid piece is sponsored by Click Rain.
After a grueling year, many small businesses are looking to recoup losses from the pandemic and jumpstart growth. It’s an ideal opportunity to take a fresh look at local marketing efforts. In this post, we’ll review some basics and explain how a strong local search marketing strategy can help businesses reach more customers online and in-store.
What is local marketing?
Local marketing is a marketing strategy that targets customers within a certain distance of a business’ physical location. One significant piece of local marketing is local search, or local SEO, which we’ll focus on in this post. Local SEO seeks to help nearby customers easily find your business using search engines and, ultimately, bring you their business.
Local SEO is a bit like the floss of the digital marketing world: It’s underutilized and crazy important.
Keeping with the metaphor, remember the last time you searched something like “dentist near me” on Google? You probably discovered a few top-rated clinics in your area. But why exactly did Google select those?
Because they won the local search game. Specifically, they beat out competitors in two key areas:
- Local listing information. This is data pulled from your Google My Business profile, including:
- Contact info.
- Service categories.
- Business description.
- COVID-19 updates.
Think of your Google My Business profile like your online brochure, a digital first impression. The more thorough your information, the better.
Accurate, helpful local listings not only make it easier for customers to learn about your business but also please the algorithms that sort and rank search results — which, of course, increase your odds of reaching more customers. Win-win.
If your business has multiple locations, you’ll want to ensure that each one displays accurate and unique information.
- Review management. Search engines also consider your customer reviews when ranking business pages. Google specifically looks at three things:
- How many reviews you have.
- How often you respond to your reviews.
- The sentiment of your reviews.
Here again, the more positive reviews your business pages have, the better. The more reviews you respond to — even not-so-great ones — the better as well.
Responding to customer reviews proves to your customers that you care about their experience with your business. Beyond that, Google reads this data to signal that your business is meeting customers’ needs and, in turn, deserves to be discovered by others. In other words, review management helps your local search SEO.
When you stay on top of these two points, you’ll help more new customers discover your business online, no matter how many locations you have.
Start with an audit
We recommend starting with an audit of your current local marketing situation, including the accuracy of your local listings information and review management data. Click Rain offers a local marketing audit package to help uncover gaps and build a plan of attack. Just drop us a line.
