Local online marketing is crucial to the success of your local business, you don’t have to waste money targeting people who are far away from your location that won’t buy your products, but you would target local people living very close to your business address which can buy your products.
Google has come up with a solution for local business owners by allowing them to target their preferred location.
Local online marketing, when done correctly by a professional digital marketing agency, would increase your brand exposure, engagement rate, and business revenue. This is why you need to outsource your local online marketing campaign to professionals.
In this article, we are going to look at 8 local online marketing tips for local business owner. Reading this guide won’t turn you into a professional digital marketer, but you will get an idea of what your local online marketing will look like.
8 Local Online Marketing Tips For Local Business Owner
Since you are not considering the traditional form of advertisement using radio, tv, banner, and so on, you need to understand the latest digital marketing tips for you to come up with new ways to reach more people.
- Use Geo Based Domain Name
One of the most important decisions you need to make is what type of domain name you want?
Business owner can come up with different domain names that they can use for their business but not every domain is good for your business.
Geo-based domain is important for your local online marketing campaign. Your web address contains local address that helps people to know where you are located before clicking on your link and getting to your website.
Examples of geo-based domain for local business owners include lagossaloon, Melbournetaxi, etc.
When users search for related keywords on Google, they can find out where your website is located because of the location-based domain. Though it takes time before ranking in SERP, this is why you need to perform keyword analysis and research.
You can also use geo-based TLD instead of the common TLD like .com, .org, .net, and .biz
- Research your domain
There are good domain and bad domain. A good domain is what you should go for as a business owner or blogger.
Blacklisted domain can wreck your business because after spending money buying your domain, host, theme, and design your website, you discover that Google is not indexing your website and post.
To avoid this problem, you need to conduct a comprehensive research about the domain.
- Create eye-catching website
Your website is the center of your local online marketing campaign; you need to invest your money to design a high-quality website that is up to date with Google guidelines.
One major factor that people neglect in digital marketing is website design. A poorly designed website would lose more customers who visit the site compared to an eye-catching website.
An eye-catching website design should have:
- Fast load speed of less than 3 seconds to avoid having a high bounce rate and poorly converting marketing campaign.
- Mobile-friendly for users visiting with smartphones. Google favors site that is mobile-friendly with an increase in ranking position.
- SSL certificate should be installed so that the site is secure. Internet users have been advised to purchase from websites with SSL certificates to avoid hackers getting their email addresses and credit card.
- Clear way of navigating to other areas of the website.
- Visual elements to make your website eye-catching should be added when designing the website.
- Keyword Research
Getting visitors from Google search engine can both be easy for professional SEO and difficult for newbies. To get traffic from Google, you need to invest in a keyword research tool.
This tool allows you to find thousands of low-hanging keywords that you can easily rank for and avoid highly competitive keywords.
Keyword research for local online marketing helps you to find local based keyword like the best restaurant in Olmo, which is what local businesses should be targeting because Google would match your local business website with this keyword if you are targeting it.
Keyword research tools that you can use for your keyword analysis and keyword research include Kwfinder, Moz, Keysearch, Semrush, etc.
- Build Backlinks
Backlinks are links juice pass from one website to another. While it takes time for Google to index your website, you can start by building high-quality do-follow backlinks to increase your domain authority and improve your chance of ranking for keywords in SERP.
- Use Pay Per Click Advertisement
Pay per click advertisement means that you only pay when people click on your website link. This is a way for you to get targeted audience to visit your website and show them what your business is all about.
Pay-per-click advertisements can help you to find more people around your location who have an interest in what you are selling.
You can reach out to a marketing agency to set up your local online marketing campaign using a pay-per-click advertisement.
- Add your website to a local online directory
Local online directory has a list of businesses in a particular location; you can also submit your website to this directory and expose your website to thousands of people who visit this site.
Another advantage is that you get a local based backlink from this directory and improve your SEO.
Ensure that you carry out a deep analysis on any directory because most online directories are just selling links.
- Social media marketing
An average internet user spends more time on social media sites than any other websites. There are so many social media sites that you join to increase your website exposure and traffic.
You can also spend money on advertisements on these sites; with proper strategy, your campaign would improve your local online marketing reach.
You can also implement Pinterest strategies to increase your pin engagement rate. Pinterest is the number 1 source of traffic for bloggers, and you too can also get traffic from Pinterest. Pinterest also allows you to run paid ads to reach people in any particular location.
Local online marketing, when done correctly, would help your business to reach more people.
