How to Target Your Local Community Online
In this day and age we often don’t know the person next door but are part of communities of common interest. The World Wide Web drives these communities we see popping up everywhere. So how do we reach our local community online? Many businesses for various reasons are limited to service only a local community, not international or even national customers. Does this mean promoting via the web is futile? Absolutely not, in fact, if you have the right strategy you can use it to your advantage.
Local search marketing is an increasingly important means of achieving high ranks on search engines. If your business only serves customers in your local community you have the advantage of being able to optimise your site to reach targeted traffic in the appropriate areas. The web has tremendous reach globally however if you are getting the wrong kind of traffic, it serves no purpose. Even companies who can service anyone in the world tend to gain customers predominantly from a small area surrounding their geographical location. For this reason, for many companies it makes more sense to target your local community. Search engines, such and Google allow advertisers to target ads by geographic regions and you can also optimise for a location also.
Online marketing through a search engine can be one of the most lucrative and focused marketing techniques many business could use. Most business owners understand the importance of targeting a niche. Online marketing is no exception. For this reason, concentrating on a local area needs careful consideration. Business owners understand intuitively that they should spend advertising dollars in areas where their target market has exposure, yet online we can overlook this simple principle. Consider your website your greatest sales person who is always working, never sleeps and never asks for a pay rise. Imagine sending this awesome salesperson out in Sydney to market your business when you run a small take-away shop in Footscray. By simply focusing your online marketing plan on your local community, your traffic generated by search engine will be more likely to become customers and not simply browsers.
The Internet is still really only in its infancy as business owners understand new ways to use it as a marketing tool. Over recent times marketing locally via search engines has become one of the biggest waves of online marketing. While traffic is important to have for any website, the right kind of traffic is what will grow your business. More and more users are searching online for local information. Local Search Marketing is a method to reach consumers, giving them valuable information and a marketing message. It is an inexpensive online strategy and often boasts high conversion rates, especially when the company is servicing a local community. Search marketing may be vital for the future of your business. Local Search Marketing is clearly an area that any business, including small local businesses, needs to investigate.
A quick tip to get you started is to add the area name to your website content wherever possible, for example instead of saying ‘plumbing’ say ‘Footscray plumbing’. Another neat trick is to include the area name next to Case Study details or Testimonials. Go through your website and think where you could add your area name that would still read well. Tell us how you go in the comments below.
