Is Your Business Missing Out On Local Customers?
It may seem an urgent priority to keep putting out your message on the national grid, but you could be missing out on valuable local business too!
If you focus your online marketing too narrowly on large UK commercial targets, you ignore your local presence at your peril. It’s often the case that, whilst waiting to land the big contracts, you could be providing valuable goods or services to your local or regional area. Indeed, they may prove equally as lucrative!
A Manchester-based website design company, for example, can plan a niche geographic email marketing campaign throughout Cheshire and the North West of England, using local directories and geo-targeted pay-per-click (PPC) ads to drive a specific, localised regional message.
Geo-targeting is a marketing strategy to target specific customers by their location, using search engine marketing techniques, including of course, SEO. Companies not only reach customers in certain locations, but also those who wish to purchase from a specific location.
You should be aware that Google now focuses on geo-targeting and is continuing to produce more relevant results on a regional basis. It may not be too long before consumers only get to see results from companies within a 25-mile radius!
The types of companies that would benefit from geo-targeting are as follows:
• Suppliers of goods and services locally – their marketing budget just focuses on one location as a dedicated service.
• Companies running a chain of stores or branches nationally – but where consumers only wish to go to the local branch.
• Export businesses – it works on an international, as well as national level.
First step – identify who your audience is AND you also need to know where that audience is located and obtain a free local listing in the search engines. A chain or franchise would need a listing for each specific location. Google Maps are being brought to the top of their normal listings by Universal Search. Listing by postcode search is now sorted by relevant content only.
Second step – and vitally important – is to carefully identify SEO keywords that visitors are searching with, according to location-specific phrases as well as more general phrases.
Third step – is to use these key phrases in combination with the three main geo-targeting techniques:
• Free local business listings – with location-specific key phrases in your description.
• Search engine optimisation (SEO) of your website for location-specific key phrases – so you appear in the natural or organic results – probably the most difficult method.
• Geo-targeted pay per click (PPC) where you either display your ads in a specific location and/or use location specific key phrases. Local PPC campaigns should have targeted general phrases, so that a company is not found for locations outside the target area. National PPC campaigns will have targeted phrases in combination with specific locations or postcodes.
A reduced cost per click and higher conversion rates can be obtained where campaigns are more targeted, but it is important to highlight that this will vary between regions.
I was on Yahoo and found your blog. Read a few of your other posts. Good work. I am looking forward to reading more from you in the future.
Tom Stanley