Generally, most of a local business competition comes from within its area. As such, the ability to dominate local search can immediately provide a substantial boost to your business/sales.
When your target market is people within the same town or city as your business, the best tactic for any business is to make itself as visible as possible within the same or nearby geolocation.
In this guide, you will learn about how to dominate your local area with your business using top inbound marketing strategies.
But first, let’s understand what going “Local with your business” means.
What Going “Local” Means
From the consumers’ point of view, local businesses are the most convenient and accessible method of addressing their needs.
If they need to make a quick purchase or immediate service, they will almost always refer to a company nearest to their current location.
For instance, last year before moving to my apartment, I needed some Window Shade Blinds, and since I didn’t know a reputable seller, all I did was google “Window Blind in Uyo”.
And from there, I located one of the dealers and purchased from him. How wonderful…
Note – Uyo – is a local “region” area.
With that in mind, Local Search Marketing is essentially defined as a marketing strategy that targets customers within a certain radius of specific geolocation.
It also refers to utilizing search engine optimization that allows a business to dominate local search results when users within the area conduct searches online.
Physical stores or branches of a company can use this digital marketing approach to leverage sales and build a brand presence among local consumers, who are more likely to become returning customers due to mere convenience alone.
Additionally, local search marketing becomes even more effective when performed with the best practices found in inbound marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing for Local Businesses?
Inbound marketing refers to creating relevant, valuable content aligned with the needs of your market.
This is designed to build meaningful connections with prospective clients and customers.
Cyberclick has a few Inbound Marketing examples for companies you can check out.
When your prospective customers see you as a business that readily provides answers and solutions to their problems and questions, then you’re able to foster relationships without incessantly pushing content in front of them.
Remember, the important thing is to have the educational video, blog post, or infographic when they actually look for it.
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3 Core Concepts of Inbound Marketing Strategies
To fully utilize inbound marketing, especially when it comes to dominating local search results, the core concepts in inbound marketing must be fully understood. These are attracting, engaging, and delighting with your content.
Let’s start with attracting customers to your business.
#1. Attracting
Attracting your core target audience means drawing the right people in. For purposes of local search marketing, these are the audiences within the radius of your geolocation.
These audiences are also compatible with the buyer personas that your business has developed.
It’s crucial to display the unique value proposition and other qualities of your products and services.
More than creating vibrant, engaging, and eye-catching content, it’s important to remember that it’s not always about sales. It’s about helping people.
When you have a clear understanding of your local market and its pain points, it makes it that much easier to craft valuable content that can drive repeat traffic to your online platforms.
Case study: an example of a local company like fnfSwap attracts and helps locals seeking to exchange their digital money (PayPal & Dollar Card funds).
#2. Engaging
Speaking of which, by identifying the target market’s pain points, end goals, and pressing problems, you can align your content marketing strategy to highlight those areas and how your business can address these issues.
Remember, direct sales are rarely the end result of a solid inbound marketing strategy – an engaged audience and increased brand awareness are.
When you’re able to establish a reputation for having the answers relevant to your products, you become a go-to resource for your market – an invaluable place to be.
The end results: you will get lots of testimonials and good words from your audience/clients.
#3. Delighting
This entails talking to your team across the board. Perhaps it’s talking to your salespeople about what could help them better connect with your audience, or what part of the buyer journey you can step into with valuable content.
It could also be identifying which platforms your target audience engages with the most.
When you’re able to provide the answers, your audience is looking for, where they’re looking for it, then you cultivate a positive impression of your brand.
Again, delighting your market is not just about urging them to buy your products—it means being there (online or otherwise) whenever they search for help. Quality customer service is one of the best strategies for this concept.
Providing a highly satisfactory customer service experience and the convenience of being visible in local search builds even more trust among your customers.
They will keep returning for the high-quality services and are likelier to share your business presence with others through solid word-of-mouth reviews.
As a result, it drives even more customers to your business, leading to more conversions.
The Keys to Dominate Local Search: Inbound Marketing
#1. Build Trust and Long-Term Connections
Most strategies that are employed in digital marketing strategies are patterned to make the sales funnel as efficient as possible.
However, while this works on a large scale, especially in digital marketplaces, they remain highly reliant on the internet audience’s ever-changing moods.
But connections need to be more meaningful when your targets are local audiences and individuals who are more likely to purchase through a physical store or location.
Through careful inbound marketing tactics (even as simple as having a presence on popular messaging apps), the kind of connection that a business could generate from local customers is one of trust and loyalty.
It’s far more likely to build long-term relationships with them, allowing the company to be top of mind when it comes to local search and queries regarding related products and services.
#2. Provide a Better Platform for Your Customers
The services your company offers become more relevant than ever when you successfully make a connection with a local market.
When you provide services that increase conveniences, such as free WiFi connectivity, free delivery within a specific distance, or pet-friendly amenities, these additional value features will matter even more to locals.
It makes it much easier for them to approach your business for their needs, knowing that they can do it more quickly and with added benefits.
For example, with pet-friendly amenities, people are more likely to come by your business during or after their daily walks with their pets, knowing they can do two errands more easily at once. When it comes to nurturing relationships, even the simplest things matter.
#3. More Local Searches Mean More Sales Than Ever
More people are using local keywords. Roughly 46% of all Google searches now include geotags within the user’s local area.
More people want easily accessible solutions, and location is one of the most important factors under consideration for convenience.
As well, localized searches for products and service providers have increased—by up to 900% over the past two years.
And when a company is in the correct local search results for their customers, this translates to more sales as nearby consumers opt for the services that are not far from their whereabouts.
Many of these local searches come from mobile platforms. Consumers are constantly on the go, so they want to find a business or a service they can reach easily during their commute.
Around 78% of all local searches eventually lead to conversion as the user heads directly to the product or service they are looking for and immediately makes a purchase.
And even if they don’t make the purchase right away, roughly 88% of them will take note of the business, its location, and hours and possibly come back in as little as 24 hours to complete the sale.
Because of this, a local business that can dominate local search results can immediately generate more profits and brand recognition.
By far, inbound marketing, and local search SEO techniques can yield the best results for a business, particularly when you consider local SEO prices.
How to Easily Find Local Searches with Inbound Marketing
If you are a blogger/expert and you have a service to offer such as digital agency, web hosting, graphics design, real estate, etc, the easiest way to find local searches is to use a tool like Google AdWords, Google Suggest, Ahrefs and SEMrush search tools to find dominating keywords.
From the forthcoming keywords, you can see more opportunities to be covered.
Using Ahrefs, see examples below.
Using Google suggest, see examples below.
To understand and find more of these keywords, check out this guide on how to start a blog in your local area + keyword analysis.
Techniques to Dominate the Local Search Game
1. Start with Google My Business
Maximizing your Google My Business profile is the first and easiest step to optimizing your business for local searches.
As the most well-known and ubiquitous search engine worldwide, everyone heads to google first for their queries and product searches. Therefore, any business needs to fill out their “My Business profile”.
Clarify your full business address, hours, and contact details. Ensure that the correct type of business is selected, along with features of your best services.
This immediately allows Google to return your business listing to local customers whose searches match your offer. Remember always to keep your information updated.
Recommendation: To get started with Google My Business, check out this guide from Google or check out BrightLocal.
2. Do Reputation Management
Improve your online reputation to elevate your presence above other local businesses and dominate local search results.
Start by encouraging your current, satisfied customers to leave good reviews for you on My Business or other business listing sites.
The local map algorithm from Google relies heavily on positive reviews from consumers, so whenever you get a positive review, make sure that you respond to them.
This builds more trust from the users who see your listing, especially when they see the owners and the customers engaging online.
Recommendation: learn how to get Google reviews for your business.
3. Start a Website with a Blog section
Creating a static website for your business showcases what your services are, your price list, your contacts, and maybe your vision board.
More than that, you need a blog section where you continue to put free content optimized to dominate the local search game and your niche – intending to get clients looking for your service(s).
For instance, if you are a Dentist in the California area. Your blog posts would be:
- Teeth care for adults in California
- Best dental hygiene schools in California
- Best dental hygiene schools in California
- Best dental hygienist schools in southern California
- Best pre-dental schools in California
- All dental schools in California, etc.
All these related terms serve as a foundation for getting clients in California. I hope you get the point.
Recommendation: here is an ultimate guide to starting a blog for your website.
Let’s see more techniques to dominate the local search using inbound marketing.
4. Optimize Your Website for Local Targeting
Use the best SEO practices to your advantage.
You want to ensure that your website’s pages and content have the proper titles and meta tags, with the correct geotag and geolocation identified.
When you put your business name in the content, tags, and pages, make sure you have made it evident where your business’s local area is.
Specify a city, county, province, or state in your tags so Google’s algorithm can detect your whereabouts.
5. Become Mobile Friendly
As mentioned in previous sections, over two-thirds of consumers now search for local businesses and services through mobile.
Everyone has a smartphone, and when they need something, they will look for it, find a map and get what they need.
This is why your business’ website must become mobile-friendly.
By being accessible and easily understood over the small smartphone screen, with plenty of information on how to reach your business, more customers are compelled to visit your business directly or make a call.
Also, take into account how fast your website loads on a smartphone.
Make sure that your website is loading quickly. Remember: online consumers, especially ones on the go that use mobile, have minimal patience.
Conclusion: How to Dominate Local Search With A Few Tweaks and a Lot of Engagement
Above all else, keep your eyes on the goal: that is attracting local customers by building long-term relationships with them.
When you understand how your local audience thinks, what their pain points are, how they search for information about their needs, and where they’re most likely to explore, you can optimize your business’s online presence so that they can find you immediately and have the solutions to their needs.
Keep the best practices and core concepts of inbound marketing in mind when developing your local search presence campaign.
In no time, you’ll have nearby customers seeking out your business, ready to make a sale.
