As more and more people search for products and services on the internet, businesses must provide a platform that enables them. This type of visibility is imperative to succeed online today.
Local search marketing is a practice that allows users to find businesses in their area. Social media marketing is a process that will enable users to share content on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
You’ll want to go beyond standard search and social optimization tips if you have a local company or one that caters to audiences in a particular geographic area. This article will walk you through many local search and social media marketing tactics.
Local Search Keyword Research
You need to know what keywords you want to employ before you can optimize your website, social media accounts, or anchor text for link building. Unfortunately, when it comes to local search marketing, you’re focusing not only on industry-specific phrases but also on geo-specific terms.
Consider the case of a small plumbing company with many sites around Washington. When designing their optimization approach, the first thing they may do is use Google AdWords Keyword Tool to look at some geo-specific keywords + plumbing to see how many times they are searched.
While the figures may not be accurate, you can be confident that “Seattle plumbing” is searched more than “Tacoma plumbing,” but “Tacoma plumbing” is searched more than “Everett” and “Edmonds plumbing” combined, based on the above statistics. When you start typing in words like that, you’ll receive more recommendations and an estimate of how many times specific phrases are searched monthly.
Do you want to try some other methods for generating keyword ideas? For example, try searching for your term suggestions in Google and scrolling down to the bottom to find similar queries.
Using SEMrush, you can also discover what keywords your top competitor’s website (the one that ranks highest for your primary targeted keyword phrase) ranks for. In addition, you’ll get ten keywords for free if you sign up for a free account.
Using a mix of these tools and studying other local rivals in your field, you should be able to come up with the best keywords for your business’s local search optimization.
Local Search On-Site Optimization
After choosing your keywords, the following step is to optimize your website for local search. Include geo-specific information, keywords, and phrases in the particular areas on your website mentioned below to let search engines know what regions you’re targeting.
Meta Descriptions and Titles
People will see your website’s SEO title tag and meta description, or another relevant snippet from your website, first in search results.
When visitors search for air conditioning repair in Seattle, those keywords will be bolded in the title and snippet about the page. Do the following to make these two places count for local search:
- Locally Optimized Title Tags — Although Google sometimes uses different titles for search results, the SEO title tag is still one of the most significant aspects of on-site optimization. Regardless, you should expect Google to use your provided title tag in search results to connect to your website. As a result, you’ll want to make sure it covers not just your essential keywords but also your location inside 70 characters.
- Locally Optimized Meta Descriptions — While Google may select for a sample of content from your website instead, having an optimized meta description never hurts. Within 165 characters, add your significant keywords, places your firm services, and phone number, if feasible.
All pages include a local address and phone number.
A local street address and phone number on all pages is another excellent indication to search engines. The majority of firms will provide this information at the bottom of their website. Check to see whether it’s in the text rather than a picture. This is beneficial for search engine bots and mobile phone users since your phone number will be clickable!
Pages Dedicated to Specific Locations
Do you have several locations but just one website? That isn’t an issue. Simply build a page for each physical location on your website. Then, anyone looking for your company in a particular place, city, state, or nation should be routed to the relevant web page.
Insert a Map
You can acquire an HTML embed code to add the map to your website if you input an address on Google Maps. To get the code, just click on the link button.
Before embedding your map on your website, you may pick the size and other elements by clicking the “customize” option.
This is a terrific method to make it easy for people to identify your location on your website, and who knows, it could even tell a Google search bot more about it.
Make a sitemap that is geo-referenced.
Do you want to be utterly confident that Google knows where you are? Then, generate a geo sitemap and a KML file for your website. It’s simple using Geo Sitemap Generator. Simply enter your business information, download the files, and upload them to the root folder of your website.
Then, under Site Configuration > Sitemaps, add your website (if you haven’t previously), and validate it using your Google Analytics. This tool allows you to track code (other choices available) and enter your geo sitemap’s URL. Instead of waiting for Google to figure out where you are, tell it!
Local Search Engine Listings
You should start off-site SEO once you’ve optimized your site for local search. So the first place to go is local search directories relevant to your situation.
Seven of the most popular local search directories are listed here.
Google Places is a search engine that allows you to find
The ultimate objective is to have the most accurate Google Places listing possible. It may mean that your company appears on the top page, above specific organic search results, for local companies.
Go to Google Places and add or claim your company to get started. Fill out as much information as possible and upload up to 10 more photographs while creating your profile. You may even include five YouTube videos about your company.
Also, by choosing “Yes, this company serves consumers at their locations,” you may conceal your address from your listing. This is an excellent choice for home companies that cater to local customers. You’ll be allowed to hide your address when you choose that option.
After you’ve finished your profile and pressed “submit,” you’ll need to pick a method for verifying your company. Some may be able to demonstrate their information over the phone right away, while others will have to wait two to three weeks for a postcard to arrive at their company address.
Encourage your customers to provide reviews after your Google Places presence is up and running. Keep an eye on your company’s studies as well. As the owner, you can reply to both positive and negative evaluations. This is a fantastic opportunity to display your customer service abilities publicly!
You may even utilize your answers to showcase your friendliness to future consumers as the previous firm has done. Finally, don’t be concerned if consumers leave reviews on other websites; many of them flow into Google Places.
The main disadvantage of off-site reviews is that they will not be included in the number of reviews and ratings shown in Google search results.
While Google Locations is one of the most significant places to be included, you must also establish profiles on other websites to generate citations for local SEO. Your local rankings will improve if you have more regular listings on more local search directories.
Yahoo Local is a local search engine.
Next on your local search listings and citations should be Yahoo Local. Finally, you may create or claim a free basic listing that contains contact information, a link to your website, hours, payment choices, email address, goods, and services.
For $9.95 a month, you can upgrade your listing to include pictures, coupons, a 3,000-character business description, and a 150-character company tagline. You may also generate a report to show how many impressions and clicks your improved listing earned. Compared to Google Places, the advantage of Yahoo Local is that it requires no authentication and just takes a few days to become live.
Local Search on Bing
Bing Local enables you to create or claim a free business listing with up to nine images. Compared to Google or Yahoo, its submission mechanism (the Bing Business Portal) is presently in beta and not the most user-friendly. Verification takes two to three weeks and is done via mail. One of the beautiful things about Bing’s local pages is that it pulls in reviews from various local search sites. Unlike Google, Bing’s local search results include the overall amount of ratings and stars from all locations.
Yelp
One of the most popular local search directories is Yelp. You may add or claim your company listing for free, and you can include images and a variety of other information in addition to your contact information. Business owners may react to reviews directly on their website, which is a great way to show their customer service expertise. Within their network, Yelp also provides pay-per-click advertising so that you can get your company listing in front of more people.
The Merchant Circle is a group of people that work.
Merchant Circle is another well-known local directory that enables companies to create or claim free listings with detailed descriptions, profile photos, and connections to their websites. It also provides free basic information on your listing, such as the keywords that bring visitors to it. It also compares your listing to an average company and the top business in your category on Merchant Circle in terms of the number of visits in the previous thirty days. You may discover more about your competitor’s local marketing approach by clicking on the “who is this?” link to find out who the leader in your industry is.
Superpages
Businesses may create or claim free listings on Superpages that contain a detailed description of their company, various categories, a list of goods and services, one associated business picture, and a link to their website. Here you may add or claim your company’s listing.
Yellow Pages (Yellow Pages)
Businesses may post or claim free listings in Yellow Pages that contain an expanded description of their company, numerous categories, and a link. Additional photographs for the business listing may also be added.
Local Directory Additions
Are you looking for additional information? Tools like Whitespark Local Citation Finder can assist you in locating the top local directories for your company. You can also look up your primary rivals’ names to check what sites they are listed on and make sure you are included there.
Why Do You Need to Claim Your Listings?
If a company has been in operation for a long time, its address and phone number are likely already recorded. Is it critical to claim your company listing in light of this? Absolutely! Many local directories have no way of proving that someone changing a listing is genuinely affiliated with the company.
If you take the effort to claim your listings on key local directories and networks, you will be able to prevent others from changing (or even eliminating) your listing.
Getting Local Testimonials
The most crucial thing you can do to improve your exposure is to collect reviews once you’ve claimed your company profiles on local search directories. A favorable rating may help your company rank higher in search results, particularly on sites that enable users to filter companies by the number of positive reviews they have received.
Here are some pointers on how to acquire positive social local search reviews.
- Add Buttons/Badges to Your Website — By including links to your company listing, you can inform your website visitors that they may rate your business on directories such as Yelp.
- Encourage Local Reviews at Your Shop — If you own a store or restaurant, just include a comment or link to your Yelp or other company listing on receipts to encourage local reviews.
- Encourage Online Ordering with Emails – Does your company have an online ordering system? Do you encourage customers to join your mailing list after purchasing on your website? If that’s the case, send individuals an email after they’ve received their orders, asking them to review their experience with your company on the business listing of their choice.
- Simply encourage customers to leave a review on your company listing if you connect with them on a regular basis in your business. The majority of individuals will gladly comply.
Even if your company is fantastic, you may get a negative review. As I previously indicated, several sites, such as Google Places and Yelp, enable company owners to reply to individual reviews. Keep an eye on your thoughts and reply to them as needed. Ignoring negative reviews will not make them go away. Visitors to your profile are left wondering what, if any, resolution your dissatisfied customers obtained.
By reacting to negative reviews, you demonstrate to prospective new consumers that your purpose is to make everyone happy, regardless of the circumstances.
Building Links for Local Keywords
After you’ve established your local company listings, the following step is to establish connections to your website. Keep in mind that you don’t want to go overboard since Google is currently working on a penalty for over-optimization. However, there are other excellent methods for obtaining linkages.
I won’t go into any more broad link-building techniques here since I’ve previously described ten hard-hitting link building approaches and exploiting link blending to optimize rankings. Instead, consider some local connecting possibilities, such as the following:
- Local Businesses That Are Related – Look for companies that are in the same industry as yours but aren’t rivals. Check to see whether those websites include resource pages with links to companies that are comparable to yours. Then see if you can start a conversation with the company owner and persuade them that your link is a beneficial resource for their visitors.
- Bloggers in your area – Find local bloggers with an audience that could be interested in your product or service. See if you can write a guest post for them or offer to sample your goods or services in return for a blog review.
- Pages of General Local Resources – Look for local business resources that didn’t show up in your local directory search and see if you can get your website included.
- Backlinks from Local Rivals – Using tools like Moz Link Explorer, examine what backlinks your local competitors’ websites have and see if you can be listed on them as well.
- Local Events — Keep an eye out for local events such as industry conferences, expos, and exhibitions. Check the event’s website to see any links to the event’s sponsors and exhibitors. If they do, consider becoming an exhibitor or sponsor of the event so that your link may appear on their site.
- Local Organizations – Support and donate to local charities to give back to your community. Many will have web pages dedicated to thanking their local sponsors and supporters, including links to the sponsors’ and donors’ respective websites.
Let’s look at some local social marketing methods now that we’ve covered the majority of the local search marketing areas.
Facebook Local Marketing
You’re likely to locate some of your target demographic on Facebook, which has 845 million monthly active users. Here are some strategies for ensuring that Facebook users in your neighborhood find your company.
Getting the Most Out of Your Facebook Page for Local Use
Making sure your Facebook page is set up as a Local Business is the best approach to optimize it for a local audience. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to set up your Facebook profile as a Local Business.
Depending on the amount of admirers, you may be allowed to modify the category if you’ve already made it. Go to Admin Panel > Manage > Edit Page and then Basic Information to discover what category your page is in. Your company will be assigned to a category and sub-category here.
Once you’ve set up your Facebook profile as a local company, be sure to fill in all of your local information, such as your street location, phone number, and business hours. If you don’t want to reveal your specific street address, just put the city, state, and zip code to give readers a rough idea of where you are.
The About information for your company is one item to highlight in the new Facebook page design. It will typically display your company’s category, location, phone number, and hours of operation.
Remove your phone number and business hours from your page’s information to make the area display your website. All you have to do now is determine which is more essential to your visitors: seeing your phone number on Facebook or being able to go on to your website. You may also post a status update with a link to your Facebook page and pin it to the top of the page so it appears in the top left column if you want your local company information to remain intact.
Using Facebook to Reach a Local Audience
You’ll want to get your Facebook page in front of a local audience after it’s been locally optimized. Here are a few easy methods to accomplish it:
- Invite Your Friends – Use the Invite Email Contacts option in the Admin Panel > Build Audience section to invite your email contacts to become fans of your company page. Then, on your own page, utilize the Ask Others option to invite friends to become fans. To acquire the best-focused audience for your page, make sure to invite people in your area.
- Become a Fan of Relevant Local Business Pages — You’ll want to stay away from rivals, but you may become a fan of related local business pages by utilizing Facebook as your page and like the page. You’ll be able to engage with the local business page by commenting on its updates after becoming a fan. Your comments will seem as if they were written on your page. This will expose your company to your target demographic, ideally resulting in new local followers for your page.
- Target Status Updates by Location — Change the selection for your status update from Public to Targeted by Location/Language to send status updates solely to those in certain places. There, you may target a specific audience inside a nation, state, or city.
- Use Facebook Ads — Facebook Ads are a low-cost approach to reach out to Facebook users in your area. Choose your Facebook page as the ad’s Destination, and then use the local targeting option to limit the ad’s reach to persons in a certain country, state, province, city, or zip code.
Twitter for Local Marketing
While Twitter’s viewership isn’t as vast as Facebook’s, it does have more than 100 million active users. It’s also a lot simpler to get followers since you can connect with people without them having to follow you. Here are some strategies for ensuring that Twitter users in your neighborhood find your company.
Getting the Most Out of Your Twitter Profile for Local Use
You don’t have to bother about correctly classifying Twitter accounts from the start to make them local-friendly. You just need to make a few small changes to your Twitter profile. In your Twitter bio, be sure to mention a geographical area as well as a local keyword phrase.
This will make it easier for anybody looking for local companies on Twitter to locate yours.
Using Twitter to Reach a Local Audience
Remember that you may communicate with anybody on Twitter, regardless of whether or not they are following you, by simply mentioning his or her @username in a status update. So here’s how to develop a local Twitter following:
- Check out Local Business Followers – Look for local companies in your sector (including rivals) on Twitter and see who follows them. They’re likely to be interested in your company as well.
- Follow Local Discussions — Using Twitter Advanced Search, you can monitor talks from people near a particular location, which you may specify by name or zip code.
- On Bing, use the Twitter Maps App — Bing has several applications that may be used to improve the usefulness of its maps, including a Twitter app. Go to Explore Map Apps and pick Twitter Maps to get started. View tweets sent in your area by zooming in on your location on the map.
Follow individuals who suit your targeted, local audience on Twitter after finding them. But don’t simply hit the “follow” button. Instead, please make a point of following their updates and interacting with them. The second component is crucial if you want to get any local Twitter followers in return.
LinkedIn Local Marketing
LinkedIn is the most popular social networking site for professionals, making it ideal for business professionals. Here are some ideas for growing a local following on LinkedIn.
Getting the Most Out of Your LinkedIn Profile for Local Business
Ensure you have put your proper location in your profile’s basic information settings to guarantee that your profile appears for anybody looking for professionals in your region. Then, for keyword optimization, include your location in the headline of your profile. Finally, make sure to include places from your current and previous jobs.
Using LinkedIn to Reach a Local Audience
In contrast to networks like Twitter, where you are encouraged to follow anybody you are just interested in, LinkedIn only wants you to interact with individuals in real life. So make sure you do the following to increase your local LinkedIn connections:
- Invite Email Connections – Importing your email relationships to LinkedIn is the most excellent approach to developing your LinkedIn connections. LinkedIn will then enable you to add anybody to your network, a LinkedIn member.
- Connect with Colleagues & Alumni — Once you’ve linked with everyone in your address book, you may reach out to current and former coworkers and alumni from the college you attended.
- LinkedIn Groups for Open Networkers LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) are those who desire to connect with as many people as possible. Join a couple of LION groups to find open networkers and then look through the members’ list. The group will be accessible through the LinkedIn connect form’s “how you know the individual” section. Then just send a private note stating why you’d want to communicate with them, such as you’re looking to expand your local LinkedIn contacts.
- Local Networking Groups — When looking for groups, look for local networking groups. You may start connecting with other members once you’ve spent some time participating with the local organizations.
- Email Your Local Contacts — It’s essential to remember that LinkedIn contacts aren’t intended to be spammed. However, you may filter your relationships by location by going to your connections page. Then you may email one or more persons at a specific place at a time. If feasible, you should email each person personally and in a customized way. If not, this might be a fantastic method to send a message to many local contacts at once.
Foursquare’s Local Marketing
Foursquare, the ultimate social network for local companies, is the last but not least in the social circuit. You should add or register your company on Foursquare if you have a location that you want to share with the public.
Getting the Most Out of Your Foursquare Profile
Foursquare company pages are as localized as they come, so there’s no need to worry. Just be sure to take advantage of the opportunity to provide more information about your company, such as connections to your other social profiles and a link to your website.
Using Foursquare to Reach a Local Audience
On Foursquare, the most significant thing is you can encourage people to check in to your business. Offering incentives such as discounts or coupons to consumers who check in often at your company is one of the most effective methods. Create specials for novices, friends, swarms (when many people check in simultaneously), loyalty, and mayors to provide incentives (the person who checks in the most at your location).
The fact that most users will not only check in on Foursquare but also share their check-in with their Twitter and Facebook audiences is one of the reasons why check-ins are so effective. In addition, people are more inclined to visit locations that their friends have visited or suggested. Thus, this is excellent word-of-mouth marketing.
Put a Foursquare window cling on your business’s window to encourage customers to check-in and promote check-ins in your area. Also, boost your Foursquare presence and offers on your website so that customers know they’re getting a good bargain when they check-in.
More Social Media Optimization Tips for Local Businesses
The following are broad guidelines for practically any network that wants to ensure that its social media presence is optimized for local audiences and is ready to expand its local audience.
- Incorporate social media links into your emails – Make sure your email signature contains a link to your top social accounts whenever you send out emails, whether they’re special mailings to your general mailing list or simply regular emails to your contacts.
- Add Social Media Buttons to Your Website – Include social network links or badges on your website so that visitors may simply connect with your company. For example, you may put them in your website’s header, sidebar, or bottom.
- Embedding Social Mentions in Printed Materials and Ads – Have you printed brochures, business cards, or ads in local publications or newspapers? Make sure to include a basic “Follow us on Twitter” or “Follow us on Facebook” link with these goods (and direct links if possible).
- Stay Active — Maintaining an active presence on social media will go a long way toward increasing engagement with your present audience.
- Encourage sharing – If you publish articles, newsletters, or blog entries on your website, encourage your visitors to share them on social media. This should assist drive new visitors to your website and links to your social media sites.
Analyzing Local Analytics
Check out the metrics below to ensure that your local marketing techniques produce local results.
Google Analytics
Examine the Audience Demographics data in Google Analytics while analyzing website traffic.
By measuring time on site, bounce rate, and pages per visit, you can identify whether local visitors remain on your site longer than other visitors. Whether you have objectives set up on your website, such as a person making a purchase or joining your mailing list, you can check if users from specific locations achieve these goals more often than others. You may discover new places to which you should direct your local marketing efforts after evaluating the data.
Facebook Analytics
Do you want to know whether you’re receiving likes from the appropriate people? To check demographics for your page’s likes, reach, and people discussing your page content, go to your Facebook page’s Insights.
Suppose you see that you’re receiving more likes outside of your target area. In that case, you’ll need to figure out how to better support audience development in that area, such as by posting more location-specific content or deals on your Facebook page.
Conclusion
If you do the procedures outlined above, you should see an increase in foot traffic to your establishment. However, when it comes to local search and social optimization, consider that results take time to appear. Don’t hold your breath for miracles in the first 30 or 60 days. If not a year, it will take months to take effect fully.
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