Understanding What Local Marketing is, and Local SEO Marketing

Understanding What Local Marketing is, and Local SEO Marketing

Most businesses that impact people’s everyday lives are not large corporations with huge marketing budgets. Many companies, both small and large, compete for new customers in local markets.

Local marketing and SEO are key for businesses to capture a solid and profitable base of customers from nearby communities. When you ask what pops up when people “Google my business,” Localized content and local search results should be the answer. This article gives you a breakdown of local marketing strategies, their meaning, and how they can work for you.

Local marketing is all about focusing on the audience living in the actual region, city, or town your business is based. In contrast. Traditional SEO for businesses is broader in its approaches. Understanding exactly who you are trying to sell to is the first step in the process. Researching the local demographic gives you an advantage when trying to market to a community.

What you want to accomplish at this early stage is creating a buyer persona to target. This persona is a detailed list of a target customer’s demographics, including age, profession, preferences, and more. It provides you with the data you need to solve potential customers’ problems and meet their personal needs.

One interesting difference between local marketing and broad traditional marketing is the focus on repeat business. Demographics are important in the early stages of marketing because they reveal the habits and preferences of locals who repeat business. A repeating customer base at a local level is hard to compete with and often successful.

Research into local demographic gives way to topics and areas of interest directly related from the community to your business. This information can be used for keyword research to identify groups of keywords that are important for SEO practices.

Search engines use keywords to rank your website’s relevance on given search terms. Local search engine results are what you are looking to influence. In the local marketing setting, these keywords are often modified with locational and behavioral modifiers you have researched from your demographic.

For example, at Power Marketing International, we often work with local businesses in Florida. We need to use different keywords and website copy depending on whether we are marketing for a landscaping company or a dentist. For example, if we are marketing for a landscaping company, we would use keywords and website copy that contain them.

You must ensure your business has a strong online presence to beat your local competition. This will help you attract more customers and convert them into sales. You can also use location-specific hashtags, share local events, and reference locations in all published content.

SEO practices might be some of the more powerful marketing tools, but they are not the only way to market locally. It is important to explore many strategies when trying to capture local business, and here are two main categories of those strategies and what each offer.

1. Get The Most Out of Your Online Presence

Outside of search engines, there are many ways the public digitally engages with your business. One great way to make sure you are locally known online is to be listed in multiple online directories.

For Google, this means registering your business’s address and phone number with its specific location on google maps. This helps to build your business profile online. You can also sign up with other directories relevant to your industry or region.

Another part of your online business profile is all the socials your company utilizes. Social media engagement is critical for furthering reach in a community. It is also excellent for link building and, therefore, search engine optimization.

Backlinks from social media sites give your website and online profile more authority. One example is local restaurants doing daily updates with specials and pictures to promote themselves. Keeping your social media updated is an advantage not to be ignored.

The final option for increasing your online presence is direct ad pay. Paying for ad space directly on any platform gives your business wider appeal and legitimacy online. Paid ads can help improve your bottom line, according to data. However, this might not be a sustainable long-term strategy.

2. Involve Your business in the community directly

Joining local community events and gatherings is an often vastly underrated strategy. The most successful businesses are the ones that stay up to date with local events and companies in their industry.

Some other avenues to explore are local airtime on radio stations or tv stations. Business articles in local papers are still great for targeting larger families or higher age groups. And most cities have local coupons and business publications that help promote the best of local businesses.

You can even use email marketing to host events to further your reputation. Sponsoring events helps you build relationships with local communities and creates a lasting connection with your brand.

Effective local marketing is still the king of keeping your business relevant and growing specifically with the customers closest to you. The best way to improve your business’s online presence is to hire a web developer who knows the local market well. They will be able to work with you to create a successful website or online profile. At Power Marketing International, we help people achieve their online digital marketing goals and lift local communities.