Improving your ROI isn’t really difficult but it does take some tracking and concentration.
About ninety percent of your neighbors are now using online search to find the services and products they want to buy locally. It is a necessity for any business to be online.
But, the days of just having a website aren’t enough any more. Businesses need to be front and center and this means incorporating a spending budget for online advertising.
Advertising and getting out in front of your target market isn’t as simple as just putting up a few ads with Google PPC. There are many avenues to assure visibility even for small local markets. In order to compete with national brands and corporate funding the small business owner can use automation technology scaled to the local market.
There are several free sources of registration that functions to validate you in the marketplace. Using the top search engines to submit your local information as well as increasing your social presence on the common social networks.
Places like Bing, Google, Yelp, Twitter etc.
This helps to assure your potential customer can find up-to-date and accurate information that clearly markets you as a LOCAL business.
Three of the top listings any business should be in are Google Local, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local. These help to ensure your business gets local visibility.
First steps are claiming and verifying these listings and then ensuring the information is optimized for accurate search results for your intended market. For example if you sell fishing lures you want to see your listing come up when a person is searching for lures and not cars.
Adding photo’s and video’s have a positive affect on your listing as well as the added social engagement with your potential clients.
The use of automation and CMS (Content Management System) to spread information about your business on the Web is also recommended. Frequent updates and useful information for people searching in your market.
Ensuring a local brand does require some work. Customized website is still an important part as well as having your pages localized and you have a branded and unique URL. Additional useful resources are establishing a social presence with your brand using networks like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others.
Reviews are the bonus and the bane of local business reputations. The average consumer responds to the authenticity of an unpaid review and if you have negative reviews they need to be addressed and managed.
Local listings will allow you to ‘speak’ with your local consumer. A place to introduce your staff and educate your consumer on your companies attributes.
There are several ways your small business can track the ROI you are getting from the internet and having a web presence. By using telephone tracking numbers, analytic coding on your website, click tracking, automate SMS responses, and documenting video views and page views.
Many people WANT to support their local businesses so it up to you to get out there where over 97% of the shoppers are looking for their products and services. Just being where people are looking has the largest potential for you will boost your sales.
