Chances are high that most of the Internet users searching for your site are searching for it locally. As local grows more important to search engine results and social activity, your options to utilize local interest to win more sales or blog viewers also increase. If you’ve been focusing on a more “general” audience, you may want to replace some of that vagueness with more concrete content that links your presence with a real-life location or store. Here are several ideas to help you out.
Localize Your SEO (Duh): Local SEO will benefit local searches, boost local completions, and generally help you meet the demands of your local audience – but only if you use it. So spend some time with basic local SEO. When it comes to your title tags and keywords, include phrases that pinpoint where you are. This doesn’t have to be complicated, just list the name of your town or your city. When people start doing local searches or Google brings up automatic local results, this will help your site appear more often.
Give Internet Viewers Local Help: Go through your basic info page and make sure that local-oriented information is there and very easy to see or find. Include your accurate and up-to-date address, your business hours, a map of your location (or link to Google Maps) and similar information. Include a photo of your business if you can. This will help professional websites give viewers more of what they want, enabling customers to quickly make a purchase decision.
Pay Attention to Maps and Listings: Keep your address updated on all the major listings so searchers can quickly see your location on a map. Google Local, Google Maps, and your profiles on Google+ are all important for this reason. Any other listing where people might search to find you also deserves frequent maintenance.
Localize Your Advertising: If you advertise for a brick-and-mortar storefront or have a similar local interest, by all means tie it to your advertising by offering local deals and coupons. But if you have a purely online business, you can still do a lot of local advertising work. For example, you could hang flyers with QR codes that offer digital coupons or take people to a particular product page. Keep track of NFC (near field communication) technology and location-based service trends to see if you can do other mobile advertising work in the future.
Use Events to Your Favor: Every location has particular events associated with it. Whether it is the beginning of a season, a big sports game, a festival or simple things like an important holiday or the start of the new school, you have plenty of options to work with. Use these events to your advantage. Write posts about them, providing news and updates that your local visitors may be interested in. Offer your opinion on how best to prepare, or put together a collection of fun facts about the event. If you are a business, tie in your promotions with these local happenings. This works across your site, blog, and social media management.
Use Images to Personalize: This point is particularly useful for blogs. Use Instagram, Vine and just plain photo embedding or slideshows to show off your local environment. It doesn’t matter if you have a business or not – just snap pictures of your interesting scenery, especially bad weather, your favorite drink at your favorite café, and so forth. Even selfies and cat pics are allowed in this context. Used in moderation, this will link your work with a real person and real person. It is an easy way to built relationships with viewers – and works well for small businesses, too.
Photo Source: Flickr
Jason Bayless is a professional blogger that gives small business and entrepreneurs SEO advice. He writes for BestSEOCompanies.com, a nationally recognized comparison website of the best SEO agencies in the United States.
Go Local: Ways to Tap into Local Power for Your Blog or Site
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