There are more than 3 billion people using the Internet and not all of them are potential customers. But some of them are. Wondering how you attract your local customers and not anyone else?
Here are some tricks of the trade:
Local Listings
While Yellow Pages may have fallen by the wayside, that doesn’t mean people aren’t looking for your business. They are just searching in different manners.
Claim your online business directory listings. And make sure you are consistent across all platforms. Have your main office phone number, website homepage and the same email for contact information. Run a test to see if your company now appears online. Type your business name into a search engine and see what populates. Or you can type your business into Moz Local and receive a score and places where you can improve.
Popular online local listings include Yelp, Google+ and Facebook. And to be fair, Yellow Pages does have an online counterpart. Keep all these listings up-to-date.
Encourage Reviews
Now that you have all your local listings up-to-date, start to encourage your customers to leave reviews about your business. There are some positive and negative ways to go about doing this. You don’t want to force reviews or offer something in exchange. This is just a bad business practice.
Select 1 or 2 sites where you would like customers to leave reviews, then remind them through in-store signage, in emails or even on invoices.
If other local patrons and businesses give you a positive review, this will speak volumes for future customers.
Local SEO
When writing content on your website, think about some local terms that you can be using to boost your search engine visibility in your preferred geographic regions. Too often companies focus on getting on page 1 of Google for a generic term.
Focusing on Local SEO instead of a national SEO strategy grants you a lot of opportunity. If nothing else, it is making you much more accessible for mobile users searching for “near me” businesses. The number of mobile searches has now surpassed desktop searches.
During content creation, don’t only try to rank high for broad, general keywords, like “manufacturing.” This is probably not going to give you the results you’re looking for anyway. People will be searching for all different types of manufacturing, looking for an economic outlook, etc. However, if you targeted “Manufacturing in Medina County” or “Tool Die in Medina County” that longer keyword focus will get you to the eyeballs that may be looking for your services.
PPC Campaigns
When utilizing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns online, you are doing just that: paying per click. That’s it.
Using pay-per-click tools such as Google Adwords, you essentially set a pay-per-click bid on the keywords relevant to your business or products. How high you bid will determine where your ad appears within search result pages. You can also set your ads to appear within a specific geographic area.
Highlight, Engage on Social Media
You have a presence in your local community, show that online. Use tagging methods on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to mention other local businesses you work with. Are you sponsoring a local little league team? Post photos of some of the games. Have a booth or donating to the community fair?
Share your efforts to your social media accounts.
Social media is best used to show the personality of your business. If you aren’t engaging with your community and highlighting what you’re doing at work and in your community, you’re missing out on that positive exposure.
And similar to PPC ads, you can create ads on social media that let you target an audience based on demographics, interest and location. For instance, on Facebook, you can create an ad or boost a post and select a zip code you’d like to target. While other social media sites don’t let you do such a narrow search, you at least have the option for a radius around a major city.
Creating localized campaigns on the Internet will take you very far in your outreach efforts. It will help you focus on reaching your target audience and increase your visibility.
Looking for some guidance on where to start? We’d love to help you. Contact us today!
