Search Marketing

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.

If you are committed to managing it properly, a PPC campaign can be one of the most effective ways to generate results by bringing in more traffic and customers. It requires a number of elements to succeed though, which include:

• Effective ads. Your ads will need to be targeted and using the right kinds of keywords for your business. Google, or any other PPC platform, will select ads in an auction and if you want your to compete successfully, they need to be clear and relevant.
• Good copy. The copy needs to be compelling to encourage people to click on your ads. Make sure you write content for your ads that is straight to the point, but also highly appealing so customers know what your services are and want to know more.
• PPC landing pages. People who click on PPC adverts are more likely to be ready to buy. Design landing pages for them to arrive at, selling to them quickly.

When you embark upon an SEO project, the keyword research you carry out is essential. It will inform everything that you do on your website to boost your rankings, as you will know which keywords to target.

Look at the keyword volumes, but don’t just use the keywords with the highest search volumes. Remember that these are going to be very competitive, so it is perhaps better to have some more local keywords in the mix, along with others that have search volume, but aren’t already saturated with big brands targeting them.

Once you know your numbers, you can build up an SEO strategy that uses them. Decide which keywords you are going to target, and why. Then work out which pages you want to use to target them. This should always be the page most relevant to your keyword, not your homepage. Aim to give people the information they need, so that when they arrive at your website, the bounce rate isn’t high.

Search marketing is a very clever tool, used by savvy business people to generate leads. It uses the power of search engines to help websites rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), meaning that brands can be found when people search for their products or services.

The whole point of search marketing is to make a website searchable. In order to do this, it needs to be seen as highly relevant to search engines. There are lots of different processes involved – these include:

• On site optimisation
• Off site optimisation and link building
• PR
• Content
• Social media

All of these things give ranking signals to search engines, showing them how relevant a website is to someone’s specific search. By making sure your website is perfect for your target audience, you are already a long way towards getting it noticed by search engines, because they will try to show people the websites they want to see.

Your web marketing agency can do a lot of things. However, what they cannot do is convert your leads. Once you get a lead, the conversion process is entirely your responsibility. You need to remember this when discussing strategies and take full ownership of your lead conversion process.

You can certainly ask your marketing agency for help in this process. They will be able to offer you advice on how to retain customers if your traffic is good. For example, they may recommend that you improve the quality of your website, so that people are more likely to get in touch when they see it. They can also recommend amendments like adding in more calls to action, to help improve your customer journey.

Make sure you have a comprehensive process for lead conversion. Look for ways to optimise the process so that your potential customers know they are in good hands.