If you own a business, then you should constantly be looking for ways to attract new customers. From handing out flyers to hosting a blog, there are many affordable ways to expand your customer count. For those of you looking for a way to attract customers online, you must first learn the basics of local SEO marketing. There are professionals who specialize in this field, and if you can afford to hire one of these people, it will make for a great investment.
Get Your Name in Local Directories
There are more than a few local directories on the Internet that generate millions of views. These include DexxKnows, SuperPages, local Chamber of Commerce listings, YellowPages, and even Yelp. Your company is probably already listed through these directories, but have you taken ownership of them? If not, you need to jump on this as soon as possible. If you don’t claim your listing on each site, a competitor of yours can, and they can demolish any sort of credibility you have, and it can take months or even years before you can gain back ownership of your listings.
Put Your Contact Info in a Header or Footer
Every footer on each page of your website should contain your company’s contact information. Also, depending on the layout of your site, if you can put this information in your headers, this will work out well for your search engine rankings.
Optimize Your Google Listing
Google has an answer for everything, right? When people search for something that is locally related to your services, Google will show a picture (if available) and your company’s contact information. This is why it’s so important for you to optimize your Google information, meaning you should create both a Google+ regular page as well as a Google Business profile. Make sure all company contact information is correct on these pages because it will often be the first content that appears when people conduct a Google search for your company. Also make sure you get your businesses /+businessname as it helps brand your company.
Team Up with Local Businesses
If you know of any other businesses in your community that host a website or blog, call them up and ask about doing a promotional blog posting for each other. After doing so, ask the business to consider adding links to your site within their postings at least once every two to three weeks. These inbound links to your site, as well as theirs, will greatly enhance your local SEO efforts.
Ask for Customer Testimonials
You should have a business card that you hand out to all customers with information on it explaining how they can leave customer testimonials. The more testimonials you have, the more influential you will be as a local business. Just remember, don’t post 20 testimonials in one day and then wait a month to post more. You should space out these reviews to ensure you don’t get red flagged by search engines, including both Yelp and Google.
David has always had an affinity for helping others… which is why he co-founded SEO 101 and has helped thousands of SMB’s and continues to do so at IntellaSphere today.