The Power of the Internet and What It Can Do For Your Local Business
You may have noticed this, but everybody is still using the internet. They use it for just about everything in fact, from finding restaurants, to ordering products, to screaming into the void about the current political trend that has everyone’s attention. While that last one’s a bit annoying, that doesn’t change the fact that the benefits of the internet can’t be ignored if you want your business to be successful. If you want to rank your local business online, however, there’s a whole lot more than just having a website.
Marketing Is Dead, Long Live Marketing
Old school marketing tactics are, if not dead, then certainly zombified. Many households no longer have traditional cable or satellite TV services, so TV ads rarely get seen. Streaming services made the mistake of not planning the use of ads for revenue at the start, so attempts to add the model now mostly annoys customers rather than engaging them. Ad blockers make banner and pop-up ads irrelevant.
Seeing ads no longer have the same effective reach, so just throwing money into ad campaigns isn’t going to help your business grow. If you want to grow and rank your local business online, there are new approaches you have to take, in addition to rethinking the old methods we all used to rely on. If you have a local business, focus on ranking locally. More people rely on local searches than ads. Knowing how to be found online is the difference between having those customers spend money with you or with your competitors.
How do you manage this?
The Key Strategies to Rank Your Local Business Online
Business Directories: Listings and Citations
Directories are a major focus if you want to rank online. What are they, though? There are primarily two types:
A. Directories
A directory listing is a comprehensive business profile that explains the full details of your business. You will usually have a directory listing on a single platform, like Facebook, Google Business Profile, or something similar. It will focus on broad details customers will want to know, like business hours, products, reviews, and other things customers will want to know about your business. They are primarily useful for establishing your presence in local searches and map results.
B. Citations
Citations, on the other hand, are simpler, mainly focused on the name, address, and phone number (called NAP). They have limited information that’s critical to contacting you and you will submit them to multiple directories to establish your contact info across the internet, reinforcing your business’s credibility and authority in general searches.
Finding Directories
You should have no trouble finding directories out there. There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, to choose from. There are so many in fact, that you’ll find top 50 directory lists with very little effort. Some are broad directories and will take citations from every company out there, while others are specialized, niche directories meant for specific business types. As you sign up for directories, you should be sure to find a few niche directories for your specific business to give you more of an edge than just general directories provide.
This will take time and consistency, but it can make a difference for local searches.
Google Business Profile
If you made any effort to keep up with online marketing, you’ve probably come across videos of all the reasons why Google is getting worse as a search engine and marketing platform. While it is true that Google is definitely going through some enshitification (also called “platform decay”), it’s still the number one search engine out there by volume of use. If you’re going to rank your local business online, you will have to make use of it – at least until someone in government finally goes after them on anti-monopoly laws in a serious way.
That means getting a Google Business Profile is an essential part of your online marketing strategy. Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), is something like a business card for online marketing. It’s used by Google to give customers searching you out all the information they need about your business in a quick, easy to digest manner. It will have your NAP, as well as images, reviews, links, and images to show searchers what they can expect. Having one also makes ranking easier, as it provides something for the search engine to refer back to and determine your relevance to searches, as well as help customers determine if your site is worth visiting. It’s essentially if you want to have any kind of reasonable presence on Google.
Review Strategies
Directories and citations are good for establishing your presence, but they aren’t nearly enough to stand out online. If you really want to rank, you need to have a strategy for getting reviews. Reviews are consistently listed as one of the most influential factors in whether or not a customer decides to go with your business over another. The more positive reviews you get and the better those reviews describe your services, the more customers will take a chance on you instead of going somewhere else.
Positive reviews are difficult to get, though. Bad reviews are easy; if someone is disappointed or angry with your service, they almost never pass up an opportunity to tell others about it. If the service is good, however, they’re liable to forget about reviewing it, unless the service is particularly outstanding, or other factors beyond your control are at play.
To get positive reviews, you need to do more than just provide good service. You need a plan for engaging your customers and reminding them how much reviews are appreciated. Through email and text messaging campaigns, you can find out how your customers feel about your services and encourage those who had good experiences to offer a review.
You might think that this would be bothersome to customers, but data shows that most customers are happy to leave reviews for good businesses if they remember to do so. The strategy isn’t to pressure people, but simply to remind them of their positive experiences and make it easier to leave a review. Be sure to lay out how much you appreciate it and how these reviews help you do better business.
Saving Time and Hassle with Marketing Automation
You can come up with a review strategy and manage it without too much trouble, but once your business reaches a certain size, doing everything yourself becomes unmanageable. Even early on, it can be difficult to handle a review strategy directly. Fortunately, there’s marketing automation software available to help.
Proper automation can handle the process of sending emails, gauging customer responses, and funneling happy customers to places they can easily leave reviews. All you need to do is lay out the strategy you wish to use, write up the basic email structure, and remember to ask customers for their email when they buy products (and even that last part can be fully automated if your business is entirely online). That way, you never have to worry about missing opportunities because you forgot to follow-up with clients. You can even include options to put customers with bad experiences in direct contact with you to resolve their issues before they go and leave a negative review. Think of all the bullets you can dodge that way!
The Call To Action
Before any of this, though, you need to actually engage with customers. Appearing in searches is good, but it doesn’t help you much if customers don’t actually go to your website and do something. The Call To Action (CTA) is the most effective way to engage customers.
A CTA is a prompt that encourages visitors to your site to do something. You’ve probably seen the most common CTA, the “Click Here To Contact Us” button. The purpose of this button is to make it easy for the customer to contact you and encourage them to do so. It’s only one way to use CTAs, though. You can also encourage them to learn more about your products and services, to buy something, inform them of special discounts, show them reviews and encourage them to leave one, and do just about anything you want. Your online business listing should include a CTA encouraging people to visit your website, providing them with a link to do so, as the easier you make it, the more likely they are to go there.
You should have multiple CTAs across your website. Paired with marketing automation, they are one of the most efficient ways to engage with your customers. Automation can also be used to A/B test your strategies and find out the best ways to approach customers.
Rank Your Local Business Online with Atlas Internet Marketing
When it comes to running a business, especially a small, local business, you may not have the knowledge or resources to manage all this yourself. It’s better to focus your efforts on the part of your business that you do well and delegate the rest to experts. If you don’t have the money to hire a dedicated marketing department – as many local businesses won’t – then you should consider working with a third party marketing company like us!
A third party marketing company will be specialized in managing your online marketing strategies, setting you up for success. You won’t have to worry about learning all the ins and outs of marking your business online and instead focus on providing quality goods and services to your customers. It saves you time and can avoid wasteful spending on strategies that don’t work, as the third party marketing firm will already have experience with good strategies.
Just how much will it help? We’ve worked with multiple business to increase sales and conversions by up to 50%. Why not get in touch with us?
That there? Call to Action! That’s how you know we’re serious.
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