If you are a business with a local focus, your website is a great way for people in the area to discover you when they are looking for a service or the products you sell. While a lot of business for local companies can come in ‘off the street’, without a good online marketing strategy that focuses on the location you operate in, you may well be missing out on the huge number of people who now search online when they want to know where to go to get what they are looking for.
Of course, like any other kind of online marketing, the best local strategies change over time as websites like Google, Facebook and Twitter change things about the way they interact with their users. This means that the start of the year is a very good time to review your strategy, and make changes to suit current trends. Here are some things to look at:
SEO and Google
If you want to do well in local users’ Google searches, what you really need is for your business to appear in Google’s ‘local pack‘ search results. This is that portion you have probably seen of a local search results page where Google shows a map and enhanced details for the first few businesses that meet the user’s search criteria. The bad news for marketers looking to achieve this is that Google changed how the local pack works in 2015, and it now only includes three businesses. If you are in a competitive market with more than two other businesses in your area doing a similar thing, you’ll need very good SEO to get a coveted spot in the local pack. Look for help with this from a professional SEO expert. WordPressDesignServices.com review the top SEO companies, and you can review their top SEO list to help find someone who”ll be able to help you.
Social Media
Social media marketing can be great for engaging local people, and also keeping in touch with your existing customers. However, since changes have been made in recent years to Facebook’s filters for what displays in a user’s timeline, your posts on your Facebook business page may not be reaching as many people as you might think. Look at your social media strategy and see if using paid Facebook Ads might help, or perhaps consider diversifying and using other forms of social media to promote yourself, like Pinterest or Instagram.
Blogging
Do you have a blog on your site? If not, creating one can be a great way to help your site win more traffic and keep customers engaged. If you do, look at its performance and see if you can improve it using a better content strategy. Perhaps you could start adding new types of content to add more value, for example YouTube videos.
There is never a bad time to review your marketing approaches, but the start of the year can make a lot of sense! Take a look at what is working for you and where you can aim to improve things, and start 2016 with a great marketing strategy!
The post Do You Need a New Local Online Marketing Strategy for 2016? appeared first on THE Tech Scoop.