Globalization is a driving force for business and has opened up markets around the world. Your company could do business with someone on the other side of the planet thanks to global shipping and the internet. However, the best chance for your company to be successful is to sell to customers that are local. Making your company one of the most well-known names around town for fixing a specific problem will bring in more customers than trying to sell far away. To do this, you’ll need a strong marketing presence. In this article, we discuss four ways to improve local search marketing.
Recap: What is Local Search Marketing
Before we discuss how to improve your local search marketing, we need to discuss what it is. Local search marketing (LSM) refers to the strategies that you use to market your company to local customers through things like SEO. Customers often find new businesses by searching on Google or other search engines. Companies market to these customers by creating localized marketing campaigns. The goal is to attract a local audience and convert its members into customers.
Improve Content Quality
When there is a question about how to improve something that involves online content, the first step that you should always take is to try to improve content quality. Quality issues can range from technical issues to writing style and design with many factors affecting the final outcome. This creates a lot of areas where your content can suffer, or be improved.
Start the process by assessing the content that you have created recently. Look at it from the lens of the reader. Does it provide value? Does it keep you interested and engaged? Then, look at the content from the lens of a search engine. Check to see if it meets the needs of the search engines, specifically the needs that directly impact rankings.
Meta Data Keywords
Keywords are a fundamental part of SEO and LSM, so knowing how to use them is critical to your success. Most companies understand how to use keywords to bring in traffic but there are many opportunities that are missed in each post’s metadata. Taking advantage of these missed opportunities gives your company the chance to catch up and surpass your competition.
Metadata can be used in several parts of your website that are not visible to viewers. One of these areas that are commonly overlooked is alt tags for images. Images have alt tags for viewers with disabilities, as well as to help search engines understand what is in those pictures. The tag is generally filled in using a description of the picture, which you can add keywords to help with SEO. Meta titles and meta descriptions do the same thing for other parts of your website, and including keywords in them is also a great way to boost SEO for LSM purposes.
Create a Better User Experience (UX)
The user experience (UX) of your website plays a big part in how effective it is at generating business for you. If customers struggle to do anything on your website, they are less likely to continue working through problems and will leave to find another company that can solve their problems. Focusing on your website’s UX not only helps with search rankings but can also generate positive word of mouth marketing for your company.
While search engines cannot directly measure your user experience, they can measure how customers interact with it. There are metrics that search engines monitor, such as bounce rate (the percentage of viewers that leave your home page without interacting with your website) and session time (how long they stay on the page). If your user experience is poor, then your website will have a high bounce rate and low session time scores, neither of which is what you want. By improving your user experience, you can improve these metrics so that search engines will improve your ranking.
Improve How You Use Online Reviews
Online reviews are an important form of social proof that potential customers use to assess new business options. If customers see bad reviews about your business, they are less likely to be involved in the business. However, there is almost nothing that you can do to stop bad reviews even if the people posting them lied about your company. The one thing that you can do is manage those reviews by responding to all of your reviews, the good ones, and the bad ones.
Responding to your online reviews shows customers that you are aware of what people think about the business and want to be engaged in the online community. Being humble and showing humility when you are praised can be an effective way of maintaining a positive relationship with a customer. The same could be said about responding positively to bad reviews and trying to address the issues in a constructive and non-confrontational way. This shows, especially to the upset customer, that you are trying to fix a problem and you care about their experience. When done well, you can turn a negative review into positive support for your company.
Get Help with Your Local Search Marketing
Every company can improve its LSM rankings, but it can be difficult to try to do on your own. Fortunately, there are business partners that can help. At KitelyTech, we work with companies to find ways of improving their SEO, including their local search marketing rankings. Call us at (800) 274 2908 to start a partnership that can help you grow your business.
