Are you looking for local viewers to find your business online? Or you’re looking to build up your local marketing strategy?
If you’re wondering what local searches are and how it can benefit your business, you’ve come to the right place as we’re about to give you a thorough insight into local searches and how it is going to help you grow your business.
What are local searches?
Local search is a self-discovery method created to achieve short term goals. It is used to find the solution and helps in selecting the most appropriate solution among a number of other solutions. In simple words, a local search is a unified approach to market your local business. Local search marketing is all about putting your local business at the top of the list in the search engines that help your local business easily be discovered by your local audience.
Why are local searches important?
According to the “think with Google” research, the following are the reasons why local searches are important:
- 50% on smartphones and 34% on desktop local searches result in people going to that physical store.
- 50% of the people performed local searches were looking for the address of a local business
- 78% of local searches result in purchasing offline
- 18% of local searches result in purchase within a day
- 12% of the people look for a local business every day
- One in three local searches on a smartphone was done by customers before entering a store
But, imagine people looking for the services or products you provide; instead of finding you, find your competitors. Ouch! That’s the major reason you need to know how local searches work.
How do local searches work?
Local searches work when search engines direct people nearby who are looking for the products or services that you provide to your local business. To make your local business visible to your local audience, you need to provide the information that search engines need to know.
How to do this? First, provide updated, most accurate, and consistent information to the relevant directories to let the search engines know your products, services, and location. This regular information tells the search engines that they can trust your business.
If the information you provide is irregular or inaccurate, the search engine won’t trust your business, which can upset your local searches position. This will make your local business invisible to your local audience.
Okay, so now, where to get started?
1. Set/Update your ‘My Business’ profile:
If your local business is new, create your business profile on the relevant websites for your business. But if you’re not a newbie, verify, claim, correct or complete your local business information in the relevant pages.
Websites like Facebook, google, bing, yahoo, etc. can be of great impact for your local searches grading. Maintain your local business website and create your business presence in top review pages/sites.
Tip: Don’t forget to respond to your customers’ reviews in a constructive and positive way, no matter how negative they are.
2. Keep up with search engines’ information collectors.
Searches engines don’t rely on the information you provide them. They collect and verify your information from several other online directories. Hence, if your business has different information in many directories, search engines will get confused and couldn’t decide when and where to list your business in its search results.
Tip: clean up your business directories, add a few and appropriate categories for your business, and be specific to help search engines know what your local business does.
3. Assess your local searches standing
To see where your business stands in local searches, open an incognito window in your browser after deleting cache and browser history. Search for your business and check where your business stands in local search. If your business shows up, is it at the top, or you’ve to go to further pages or dig deep to the bottom to find your business?
4. Build an integrated marketing strategy
Customers interact more with businesses having integrated marketing methods. Establish your social media presence, use an advertising marketing strategy to contact new markets once you’re done with setting up your presence for local searches. This integrated strategy will help your local business grow and become visible to your local audience.
5. Look for a reliable Local searches marketing company
If you don’t have much time to build or handle your online marketing, keep these criteria in mind when you’re looking for a reliable local search promoting company.
- Avoid companies that make odd promises like getting you top the search ranking overnight.
- Look out for the scammers who try to win your compliance with threats.
- Look for local search marketing strategists, don’t rely on software.
- Find out if the strategist or company can cope up with search engines’ updating algorithms
- Read the contract thoroughly; avoid long-term contracts and look for hard working companies that’ll improve your local search presence.
6. Use graphics to boost your local search presence
Customers of today are highly graphic driven and prefer businesses that provide a virtual trip to the business. Setting up a virtual trip of your business will not only improve your local search presence but also let your business photos be visible in other features of search engines, like maps, photos, etc.
Tip: search engines like Google give special treatment to the business, which provides 3-D graphic photos to their business site.
Wrapping up!
As you now know what local searches mean to your business and got the necessary information for starting up your local searches’ strategy. Remember to always be patient as results do not show up overnight. But if your business strategy is unique and up-to-date, your local business would most likely to improve your local search presence and get visible to the local audience.
