Local SEO
Search engines double as business listings through local search. To ensure the highest ranking possible for your business website, you need to clearly tell Google and Bing up to date information regarding the location of your business, opening hours and the type of your business. You local SEO efforts should include claiming your Google Business Page, consistently listing your name, address and phone number across your whole website (ideally on every page and with schema.org markup) and acquiring local reviews.
Google Adwords
If you’re not using Google Adwords already, your competition most likely is. While Local SEO measures will help you with your organic rankings, you can use Adwords to acquire customers through paid search. An average text ad can generate around 200 clicks per day – with an industry average conversion rate of 2%, Google Adwords could bring you a couple of new customers per day. You can design your ad campaign to specifically target people only in your area to see geomarketing in action!
Content
Marketers wil always stress that content is king, and it goes for geomarketing as well. Quality content adds weight to your page and is a positive ranking factor as well. If your business does not have a blog already, now is the time to start. Find a healthy mixture between covering local interests and writing about your business. Blog posts should be 500 words minimum to be considered authoritative by search engines. Blogging about local interests attracts new and potential customers to your site and offer value to your existing ones. You should aim to create brand recognition and loyalty in the long run with your business blog.
Social Media
Your clients and customers are already using social media. Whether or not they’re already talking about your business, the only way to influence that is to be on there as well. Each social media channel works slightly different as to how to attract followers, so you need to experiment a little to discover where your audience is and what social geomarketing strategy works for your local business. Again, local is the keyword here – 5,000 likes from locals on Facebook might be more worth than 10,000 from people who are not even near your business.
On Twitter, you can use the advanced search to find people near the location of your business. Select users to follow with content you can retweet. Only roughly 20% should be about your company, because no one wants to follow a promotional only account. The content you share on social media should create value for your followers, create connections and form a community around your brand.
Social Media Advertising
Apart from investing time into maintaining your presence on social media and curating content, you can also use paid advertising on social media as part of your geomarketing efforts. The advantage here is social media sites (especially Facebook and Twitter) will allow you to very specifically target not only your location, but also your ideal customer. You can choose a custom audience, location, demographic, age and gender, interests, behavior and connections. With paid geomarketing on social networks, you can optimize your campaigns to get the most of your advertising buck and target those most likely to visit your local business.
