How your local business can benefit from online marketing

If you run a local business, you may be missing out on a goldmine of effective online marketing opportunities. Even small, family run businesses can benefit from carrying out strategies for marketing online. Social media is well-known for connecting businesses to customers and you can use it to find revenue generating customers both in your local area and further afield. Along with social media, however, there is also a huge variety of online marketing opportunities which you can use to market your location-based business successfully. Here are some of the top marketing strategies which you could use.

Location Search

There are a number of things which you can do in order to optimise your website for local search and attract more local customers and clients. In order to do this, the first thing that you should do is identify the keywords that describe your business, and add your area to that keyword or phrase. Next, you should include an address and location on each page of your website. This information should be placed onto your website in text rather than image format so that search engines can easily crawl the information. Adding a map and a photograph of the location on your website is also a good idea. This optimisation will help you to appear in Google’s local search results when a user searches for businesses or services like the ones you offer when they are nearby.

Join Local Directories

Local directories and review sites can help your website to achieve better ranking on Google local search results. When joining local directories, it’s important that you include as much information as possible about your business location both on your website and in these local listings. You should also ensure that the information in each listing is the same – for example don’t list your business as ‘A.B.C Services’ in one directory and ‘ABC Services’ in another as this could hurt your rankings. Encourage your customers to leave reviews of your business on the top local directories and review sites. The more positive reviews that you have, the better ranking your business will have.

Content Marketing

Content marketing isn’t just for the big boys – using a content marketing agency such as clickintelligence.co.uk can also be highly beneficial for small, local businesses as well. Content marketing includes a range of different online marketing strategies such as using blogs to increase interest in your business or guest posting and linking to your business website on other popular blogs. Social media marketing is also a large part of content marketing, and ensuring that you have a good strategy to your social media updates will heighten your chances of gaining more new customers. Social media content is also important for engaging your existing customers and helping them to retain interest in your brand, products and services. Facebook and Twitter are the two most popular social networking sites which you can use to promote your brand.

Online marketing is just as important for small local businesses as it is to large, global corporations.