Get In Touch With Your Online Local Marketing

Writing by Brick Marketing in Internet Marketing

Guest post by Jessica Sanders of ResourceNation.com

With the online business world seeing it’s highest levels of engagement with online marketing, it’s easy to forget about the customers right in your backyard. While social networks are still a smart way to reach these customers, there are a variety of tools you can use to reach and be reached, at a local level.

Optimizing your online presence for local gets you greater online visibility, and gives you more opportunity to be found by those not necessarily looking for you. According to Local Online Marketing Tips, “83% of U.S. households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services…” With that said, it’s time to optimize yourself for the local customer.

Using Local Keywords
How do you rank on Google right now? Keyword use. So, it makes sense that when trying to rank for local searches that you would use a similar tactic. While you don’t necessarily need to be using your local address in each and every blog post or content section, you should be sure that it’s visible on the site in general for Google search spiders to pick up on.

1. Analysis: Analyze keywords for your niche at a local level.
2. Meta tags: Be sure to include your physical address and top keyword. Putting these two together give you a better chance of showing up for both searches, together and separately
3. Alt text: If there is a main photo or logo on your site, put your address in the alt tag.

Claim Your Online Profiles
With dozens of places for online business profiles, there’s a good chance that you’re being listed without actually knowing it. Because of this, there is potential that misinformation is being shared and, if found, could be harmful to your business.

According to ReviewTrackers.com, “To minimize the risk of someone misrepresenting you – and to maximize the word-of-mouth power of the Web – take a proactive approach and claim your business listings and profiles as soon as you can.” There are three factors to remember when seeking out your profiles.

1. Go to popular business profile sites: Start with the big hitters, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Then seek out business profile sites within your niche.
2. Correct information: To have a successful local online presence you must be providing customers with accurate information. Be sure that all your listed information is accurate.
3. Customize: Take control of editing your profile so you can customize the information, and optimize it with keywords.

The New Google+ Local
With over 80 million Google places pages transferred to Google+ local, it’s important that you are involved and easy to find. When Google places and Google+ is integrated into this one hyper local search engine, you can be sure to get more eyes on your name.

1. Promote your listing: Use your Google+ page to promote your listing – get people looking and bookmarking.
2. Reviews: Make a point to encourage customers to review your business. More and more people are turning to online reviews to make purchasing decisions.
3. Update: Be sure that your data is always up to date, and optimized for search.

Associating yourself with the local community is a great way to get more views in the search engines. If you optimize your site and business profiles for local, you are sure to get organic traffic coming from each and every angle.

Jessica Sanders is an avid small business writer touching on topics that range from social media to business management. She is a professional blogger and web content writer for ResourceNation.com.