How to Tell If Your Local SEO Is Actually Working

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For local businesses, making sure your customers can find your business by searching for things like ‘plumber near me’ or ‘coffee shop in [town]’ is local SEO. As opposed to general SEO, which is the ranking of business results for searches of unrefined keywords, local SEO is going after customers in the geographic serving area.

A great place to start to make sure your local SEO efforts have the potential for positive impact is to optimize your Google Business Profile. This is the listing people see when they search for your business that includes your listing, hours, a review, and address. Updating your GBP listing is a good exercise to do on a consistent basis to ensure your hours and address haven’t changed and that your listing number is working. Listing inconsistencies may seem small and obvious, but these errors lose your business potential customers.

Another way to check is looking at reviews. A steady stream of new reviews is usually a good sign of good local business visibility. Businesses with no reviews appear less trustworthy, even if the service is great.

Empty reviews areas scare away customers.

Try searching for your business name like a potential customer. Check to see what pops up when you search your business name + city/region. You should see your business when potential customers search for your services with your city/region location. Customers search for local businesses if they don’t see the business in the first search results. Seeing your business pop up on search results is good, even if you are way down the results list.

You are also welcome to be patient when seeing results. Changes to local search engine optimization take time to see results. Improving your business visibility generally takes time. Recent changes you made to your business may take time to see results, that doesn’t mean the changes were not made or will never be seen.

Ask yourself if something else could be impacting your lack of traction after a few months of no movement. For example, are there aspects of your website or your listing details that may require more attention? Also, you may need to direct more effort toward motivating movement in the right direction.

Why Your Brand Colours Keep Confusing Customers

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It’s not most brand owners’ goals to confuse customers, but it happens and usually is color related. It might be the case that your blue on your website is slightly different from blue on your packaging. It might also be the case that your social media profile uses an older version of your logo, which is not the case for your website or packaging. Small differences like these, while definitely small, are not unnoticeable to the customer and can detract from the appearance of your brand.

As you might imagine, it’s easy for this to occur. If your website was done by one person, your business cards by someone else, and your social media graphics tossed together by whoever had time, no one checks to the colors as they are all over the place and mini differences occur over time.

It is worrying that customers see these differences, even if they are tiny, because they are not focused enough to appreciate the effect of each. Just because your customers do not evaluate your social media against your website to determine if your brand is consistent, does not mean that a slight difference between these is not eroding trust, especially because of new customers.

This can be an easy change. Start saving the specific colors (hex codes) designers use and reference when they need to. You can then create document where you save the hex codes so they are quick and easily accessible. When having to create anything from a social media post to a flyer, use these dedicated hex codes. No more eyeballing it.

The same can be said for your final approved logo. There needs to be one official logo that is preserved and is the only version that is to be used for marketing. It really is shocking to see how quickly companies lose control of their brand identity and logs. There can be several altered and/or resized versions floating around and people don’t even know it.

Fonts can be just as bad. Using the same fonts online vs in print. Customers may not understand the feeling of inconsistency but they can definitely feel something is wrong even if they can’t explain it.

This doesn’t have to be perfect right away. Fixing brand consistency issues doesn’t happen all at once. Most brands amass these inconsistencies over time, so the fix will happen over time too. Focus on what the customers see most, such as your website and major social media channels, and branch out from there. This is work that, while uninteresting or boring, is important and builds a trustworthy business.

Do You Actually Need a New Logo, or Just Better Print Materials?

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It’s a conversation a lot of business owners have with themselves at some point. Things feel a bit stale, sales might have slowed, or you’ve just outgrown the identity you started with, and the instinct is often to jump straight to rebranding. A new logo, new colours, a whole new look. But before going down that road, it’s worth asking whether what you actually need is a refresh of your print materials rather than a complete overhaul.

A lot of the time, the core of a brand is fine, it’s just the way it’s being presented that’s letting it down. Business cards that were designed years ago on a budget, brochures that look dated, packaging that hasn’t been touched since the business first launched. These things age in a way that can make a perfectly good brand feel tired, even when the underlying idea behind the business is still solid.

Rebranding is also a bigger undertaking than most people expect. It’s not just designing a new logo, it means updating your website, your social media, your signage, your packaging, and making sure customers who already know you don’t get confused by the sudden change. For an established business with existing customers, that can actually do more harm than good if it’s not really necessary.

Refreshing your print materials, on the other hand, is a much smaller job. It might mean redesigning your business cards with better paper stock, updating your brochures with more current photography, or giving your packaging a cleaner, more modern layout, all while keeping your existing logo and colours intact. It’s a way of modernising how you present yourself without losing the recognition you’ve already built up.

One way to figure out which route makes more sense is to think about what’s actually causing the problem. If customers seem confused about what you do, or if your brand doesn’t reflect who you are anymore, that might point towards needing a proper rebrand. But if the core identity still feels right and it’s really just the materials themselves looking dated, a print refresh is usually the simpler and cheaper option.

It’s also worth remembering that print materials get replaced more often than logos anyway. Business cards run out, brochures get reprinted, packaging gets redesigned as products change. These are natural points where you can quietly modernise your look without the disruption of a full rebrand.

If you’re genuinely unsure which camp you fall into, it can help to get a second opinion from someone outside the business, since it’s easy to lose perspective on your own brand after staring at it every day. Sometimes what feels stale to you isn’t actually a problem for your customers at all, it’s just familiarity setting in on your end.

Social media and your business

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If you run your own business, then it’s always wise to make yourself as visible to the public as possible. This all helps with brand recognition and promoting your business. One great way to do this is by using social media. Some people choose to use a company to create and manage their social media accounts, however, this can be quite costly. One way of keep costs down can be to manage your social media accounts yourself. This can be quite time consuming, and you may need to do some research to ensure that the things that you post help promote your company. You wouldn’t want your posts to have a negative effect on your brand or be cause for someone to complain.

It’s a good idea to check out your competition, see what sort of topics they post about and see the effects their posts have on their client base.

A good post to use on social media can be posting reviews from previous customers, these are great promotional tools and will help you engage with new potential customers.

You may also want to run competitions or prize draws from your page that involve people ‘liking’ and ‘following’ your page to be in with a chance of winning.   

Building a brand from scratch

Lia

Starting up a business can be an exciting but daunting experience as you try to decide where to spend your initial outlay and which marketing strategies will be most effective. Getting your companies brand known is vital and that includes the name and logo if applicable.

Choosing the name of your company or brand name is an important first step. Think about the business and whether the chosen name informs people about the services and/or products the business supplies. Once you have a memorable, catchy name, you need to research whether any other company has that same name especially in your local area and if there is a copyright on that name.

Deciding on your brand logo is an important decision to make as often people will recognise an image quicker than they will recognise text. Although you can employ a graphic designer to create a logo for you, most people will be able to come up with a design especially if you use the internet to give you a few initial ideas. Once you have the name and logo organised it is important to use them on the new company website that you will need, to further market your business effectively.