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Marketing Tips for Local Business

When you’re trying to promote a small business, every little thing that you do needs to be thought out before hand. The reason for this is that every dollar that you spend, and every hour that you pour into marketing efforts, is extremely valuable when you’re working on a very small scale. That is why marketing small businesses can be even more difficult than marketing large ones. However, these tips can help you make sure that your time and effort are producing results.

Focus on Local SEO:

The problem with the SEO aims of many local businesses is that they aim far too high. If you sell a product like computers, you’re competing with thousands of other businesses for a spot in the general SEO rankings, and it can take a very long time to take enough effective SEO action to climb through those ranks. However, if you focus on local SEO instead, you may find that you can achieve results much more quickly. When people search for computers in your city, you will rank near the top with a Google Places listing and your business noted easily on a map for prospective customers to find. If you’re trying to drive business to an actual physical storefront, this is a much more effective strategy than just aiming for better overall SEO performance.

Get Social:

The social networks have a great deal of value in marketing any product online, but they can be even more useful when dealing with a local business. This is because the majority of people that a given person connects with on a social network such as Facebook are actually from within the same geographic area. That means if you can get a few people interested in your business or liking your Facebook page, the word will spread amongst their friends, who are also geographically qualified as potential customers.

Start Branding – Everything

Branding is one of the most important things for small local businesses to engage in. We all can think of a few businesses in our neighborhood or city that have that enormous reputation. There are always those stores that everyone knows about for some reason. This type of notoriety is achieved through excellent branding methodologies. Branding really needs to be present on all of your online material so that people can start to connect it with your physical store. This means logos on your webpages and social networking profiles, a slogan that is used across social media, mention of your business in your email signature and anything else that you can think of.

Get the Word out Online:

Obviously, having your own webpage online is important when promoting a local business. Getting your business mentioned by other webpages can be even more valuable to the overall marketing process though. If you can get local news sites, local bloggers, or local directories to list or mention your business, it is going to bring you multiple rewards. First of all, well established local sites have high traffic flow of local visitors. That means that there will be lots of eyes on your store name, which could lead to visitors to your site or store.

Secondly, and no less importantly, getting other sites with a high reputation in the eyes of Google to mention your own is going to help boost your local SEO rankings, especially if they are websites that focus on local business. This brings us full circle back to the first tip and shows how internet marketing strategies can be cumulative and build off each other. A well rounded approach will present you with the best overall results.


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5 Comments Published

Jerry / 17 May 2011 / Reply

Also, you need good content to keep readers coming back and Google loves fresh content. In addition, need to offer your visitors something of value in exchange for their email address.

tony / 4 November 2011 / Reply

Good point. I see websites that rank high whether their an online or offline business but lack in sales due to poor content which I think is the most important in ranking.

Dom / 11 August 2011 / Reply

Good article and helpful with tips for SEO and ranking. Thanks for posting!

tony / 4 November 2011 / Reply

I see websites that rank high whether their an online or offline business but lack in sales due to poor content which I think is the most important in ranking.

Wignal / 31 October 2012 / Reply

What great content you have on your site. Such quality and professionalism is a breath of fresh air. You certainly deserve a round of applause for this post and more specifically, your blog in general.

Very high quality material. I’m finding out so much from you as I have an interest in providing my local area with the information they need to showcase thier business on the Internet locally.

Your content is just perfect for that!

But, I have an Adsense problem that I think that yourself or your readers may be able to give me a hand in sorting out. I would like to insert my Adsense code to my WordPress blog, but it doesn’t seem to work with…

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Thank you so much, keep up the good work (two thumbs up)!

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