5 Local Internet Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business

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Editorial Staff

Why most businesses go on internet is to break local frontiers and reach out worldwide to a much larger audience for the main purpose of marketing.


No wonder there exists various internet marketing strategies to help promote businesses online


But what of those who wish to utilize the power of internet to grow their businesses within their very own locality?


This is where Local Internet Marketing comes into play.


If you are one of these, no worries, for in this article, we will explain what local internet or online marketing is and the various tips and strategies you can implement to promote your business locally.


So, what else are we waiting for?


Lets jump into the nitty gritty of this topic


SPECIAL NOTICE: If you don’t have much time to read, feel free to click on any of these category topics that interests you for quick access.


What is Local Internet Marketing


What is the term “Local Internet Marketing”?

To break this down in layman understanding, this term comprises 2 major word phrases;

  1. Local
  2. internet marketing.

Starting with the first; local, Local means relating to a restricted particular geographical area, region or neighborhood. It can be villages within a town or town with a city or a whole city.


As shown below, such geographical area can be a cluster of villages and towns that are within your reach i.e. areas you can easily travel to and from.

Examples are London(city) in United kingdom, Dallas(town) in Texas(city) USA, Bangalore(town) in Karnataka(city) India, Agboyi(village) in Alapere(town) in Lagos Nigeria, los Angeles(city) in California(state) USA etc.

Now, on the other hand, we have the second (which is internet marketing).

Internet marketing is the process of using the internet to create more awareness about your business, website, products and services etc. to group of persons.

In other words, It simply means making practical use of various internet technologies to make people, especially those in distant locations, know that you exist via its marketing channels such as social media, search engines, websites/blogs, email, advertisements and videos.

………………COMBINING THESE 2 TERMS TOGETHER……………

So incorporating it with the word “local”, it simply means executing such process(internet form of marketing) within your local community or geographical area ONLY.


Local + Internet Marketing = Local Internet Marketing


A good example is doing advert broadcast on a new product in a local internet-access radio station in the USA e.g. WBBM-AM radio to the people of Chicago, Illinois USA.

Another example is running a social media ad(e.g. Facebook) targeting a very specific location and a certain group of persons(in terms of tribe, age, educational backgrounds, race etc.)

Just like long tail keywords, local online marketing targets a very specific volume of persons within a restricted area for which a local product or service is specifically made for and not just volume but their characteristics as well.


This is a very big advantage of this form of marketing.


Another gain is that it is more likely to convert very well, that is the tendency of your targets buying your product or downloading your file or visiting your website etc. is very high.


This is of very huge benefit to local businesses which specializes in the production of local products and services to reach out to more potential customers and generate sales and revenue.


This is also good for businesses who don’t have the financial and infrastructural capacity to go international.

So if you operate such form of business and understand what local online marketing is, we will reel out its various forms of strategy to help you get started in promoting your business locally online.


Now, lets check them out below;


Create A Website/Blog

In locating your business physically for any reason, certain factors might hinder potential customers from coming over to see further information and one of them is long distance and good road network especially in the rural areas.


So what do you do at this point?


ENTER: Create A Website

All you need do is to set up a website and input every details about your business including its location, knowledge base, your products and services description and prices, resources, contact details(e.g. email, phone numbers) and everything else you need to know.


So with all these information at hand, they can obtain a forward knowledge about your business before making an informed decision without necessarily coming over physically to ask questions.


Now, the big question is this: How do we create such website or blog?


The following steps will guide you through;

  1. Create a domain(website) name: It can be your personal name or any name that relates to your niche.
  2. Choose a suitable web hosting provider according to your specifications
  3. Install your webhosting package to put your website online
  4. Install a website platform e.g. wordpress(.org or .com) or Blogpost. WordPress is the most ideal here.
  5. Write relevant web contents, legal, contact and About us pages.

Creating a website by going through these steps is an entire topic on its own and requires technical skills and expertise to set up one successfully as any slight mistake can shatter the whole process completely.


But don’t lose sleep over this.


I have written a fully comprehensive tutorial that will guide you through the process of setting up a website with ease HERE: Steps To Create A Website Or Blog


So after creating one, what next……………………………….?


Do Local Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

International and high authority websites only are not privileged to enjoy monopoly of search engine result pages(SERPs). Customers make use of SERPs to access websites of businesses within their local area after conducting organic search especially with thier mobile devices.

Infact, a study research proves about 46% of all searches are local i.e. have local content.

So how do we make this possible for your website to show up in local searches?


HERE COMES: Local Search Engine Optimization(Local SEO).


What is Local SEO?


It is the process of optimizing your website to boost its chances of showing up in search results during local search and it involves the following 2 major search result aspects

  1. the map pack result:
  2. the blue pack result(its called blue because its webpage links are blue in color).

To understand it, take a look at this image below showing the results of a local search: car shops new dehli


The MAP PACK contains the map showing physical locations and business listings while the BLUE PACK contains the regular search results we are all familiar with.

You can rank for either or both of them, but ranking for both allows for your business to be more recognized by searchers than your competitors.


Now, the big issue is this; How Do We Rank For Both Of Them?


Just for the regular search results, there are also ranking factors for local search engine optimization as well and as we deal with the 2 packs, we will take a dive into these ranking factors.


First, lets deal with ranking for Map Pack.


How To Rank For Map Pack

One good factor for map pack is Google Business Profile(GBP).


Why rank for Google business profile(GBP)?


Google states that there is 70% chance that customers will patronize businesses with a complete GBP and 50% more likely to buy from them. SO going for GBP shouldn’t be an option at all.


So beginning with GBP, how do we optimize our business for it?


To get started, you need to create a business profile through GBP and the following steps will lead you through

  • Visit the google business page to get started and create or claim your google account by clicking “manage now” or “sign in” respectively.
  • After that, input your business name as shown below and click “continue”
  • After that, choose the type of business that signifies that of yours by ticking the most appropriate. It can be atleast one.
  • The next step is to include your website link. Do it and click “Next”. You can skip this if you don’t have a website yet.
  • Continue with other necessary steps as it comes till the end.

Setting up this google my business(GMB) might pose a challenge at some point, but Ahrefs has dealt with these steps very extensively to your understanding in this topic here: How to optimize Google my business


Once done, go through all what you have filled in before Google will go through your profile and if it meet the necessary requirements of GBP, it will be verified.


Special Note: It is highly recommended you fill in every data info as you progress step by step and be truthful and accurate. Don’t skip any at all or else don’t submit yet for verification purposes.


To round up the optimization of your business for local map pack to its fullest, carry out these procedures as stated below;


Make Everything Consistent

Every info(such as address, phone numbers, business name, location, operating hours etc.) MUST be the same as that in your website and across board all through even abbreviations, letters, short forms etc. must be same.

This signifies to google that your business is legit.

Fill up Every Data space

Do not skip or withhold any info whether vital or trivial in any step because you can never tell which of them is the customer seeking for during scrutiny. And also to boost your chances of appearing in local search results.


Update Crucial Business Data

Any address change? Or change in operating hours? Or whatever at all?
Go back to your GBP profile and update them ASAP.


Ask for Reviews

Create provision for customers to express their views and opinions about your products and services and make sure you reply to all to them(even the negative ones).
Doing this shows to potential customers and Google that you care and serious about your business.

NAP(Name, Address, Phone number) Citations

NAP citations are anywhere you can input your business name, address and phone number of your local business. And it mustn’t just be only on your GBP profile but on as many platforms as possible such as social media, business directories etc.

Below is a good example of one;


Google use this citation to confirm that your business contact info is correct provided it is consistent across board.


Online Reviews


Initially business owners may be scared of installing online reviews platform for fear of getting bad reviews that can hurt their business reputation.

But far from that.

Actually negative reviews hurts but it is a blessing in disguise.


How?


It some-kind-of represents the real genuineness of your business especially if you respond to such reviews to clarify issues. Hence you need not fear at all.


Besides there wont be anyway negative reviews will supersedes the positive ones expect you are not offering good quality services to satisfy your customers to the fullest.


Reviews come in 2 forms:

  • Star ratings (highest number = 5, lowest = 0)
  • Comments

These forms of reviews complement each other.


Take a good look at these business below. The overall highest ratings is 5 and getting 4.3, 4.7 and 3.8 out of 5 based on the star ratings isn’t bad for these businesses.

Note that the higher the ratings towards 5, the better and vice versa.


And these businesses are ranking in the top 3 of local search listings partly due to these ratings(which are not bad at all).


So how do we make it easy for them to leave a review.


Send them(your customers) an email with the review link.


But you have to generate the link first.


HERE IS HOW:


First Step: Go to your GMB profile and go to the “get more reviews” card.

Second Step: from there, you generate your review link, copy and send to them.


Local Link Building

Off-page SEO works for Local search optimization as well, particularly link building and in this case, local backlink building.


local link building is more like a subset of the regular link building being preached and practiced on a daily basis.

The difference is just that instead of target niche-related websites globally, we will only concentrate on local businesses that operate within our area of interest.


For example, an upcoming business(say, a beauty salon) hoping to get links from an firm that organizes beauty contest shows within a restricted area be it a town or country.


So what are the avenues through which we can obtain local links from?

  1. Neighborhood businesses: you can reach out to your fellow competitor businesses close to you to do link exchange or buy backlink for a fee whatsoever.
    If possible, go for those of high reputation.
  2. Local Newspapers and Magazines: You can place an advert to advertise your business alongside your link in it. it can be in text, sponsored posts, graphic etc.

    Below is a typical example of business ads placement(in graphic form) on a local Nigeria newspaper website: punchng;


3. Event sponsorship: If you observe that a particular event be it a show, contest, parade etc. is taking place soon, you can reach out to the management and bid to be among its sponsors.
Through that you can acquire a local backlink to your business website.


4. Friends, Associates and Relatives: Reaching out to your relatives and friends who operate local businesses is one of the easiest ways to obtain a local link. All you need do is to appeal to them to insert your link in any of their local webpage contents where necessary. It works perfectly.


5. Local chamber of commerce(LCC): According to brain dean on his article on Local SEO, he stated that one can apply to LCC within his locality for placement of business objectives, contacts, web links etc. provided you offer something substantial to it.

I mean something that local businesses registered on LCC can gain from. And while doing that, you will be allowed to register and input your local business details including your website link on it.

IF you are asked to pay a annual fee for membership, no problem so far it is not that costly.


Aside these 5 mentioned above, there are several other opportunities you can utilize to get local links.


Such include the following;


– Local community groups e.g. Facebook, reddit, twitter, LinkedIn etc.
– local business directories
– podcasts
– local awards
– universities and colleges e.g. job openings, scholarships, alumni links, club sponsorships etc.


Create localized content

Writing content is just the same as the usual content formula bloggers and webmasters create on thier blogs/websites.

The difference here is creating content that is specific to your location ONLY(where you are operating your business).

And if you run in multiple locations, you need to write unique articles that suits these locations.


This is because what applies to a particular location may not go for another.

For example, in china, if a fruit is very prominent and highly consumed in tiajin than in shanghai, writing an article targeting tiajin populace will do a lot of good for you.


Focus On Social Media

This is a fact.


Social media has taken over the internet space by force almost completely. I mean just check out these statistics below in this image courtesy of datareportal

image source: shopify

These are the most popular social media sites alongside the total number of active users.


Crazy numbers right?


Yeah! especially that of Facebook and YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram running into billions of them.


So wont it be wise for us to tap into these sites and utilize them for local internet marketing of our business?


Your guess is as good as mine.


But scrutinizing them one my one will take so much time and space, hence we will only concentrate on the king of them all: Facebook going by their highest statistic


How To Use Facebook For Local Internet Marketing


One unique feature about social media when it comes to local internet marketing is that it offers a super targeted audience in various ways such as age range, gender, location(including inner town or village), educational background, language, race etc.


So, how do we leverage the power of Facebook to promote our business locally?


There are several steps to follow to achieve this.


Step One

Create a Facebook page that represents your business.


It can be done directly from its login page(especially if you don’t have a Facebook account) as shown in this image below.


Or from your Facebook account(if you have an account already) by first clicking the dotted block(in the top left side) as shown below


After that, a dropdown menu appears, under “create“, click “page” as shown below;


After clicking “page”, it will take you to a new place where you input the following;


page name: you write your business name here
Category: here, you type the niche your business falls into e.g football, music, agriculture, entertainment, automobile store, men’s store etc. infact, if you type your 1st letter, a group of suggestions shows up and if you see what matches your business, you click on it.
Description: you write what your business is about.


After all these, you click the “create page” to finally create your business page.


You can add images, business contacts and other details after you have creating the page.


Once you are finally and completely done, your business page should look something like this below that i created for my website: chetaweb.info


That is the end of step one.


For more guidance on creating such page to avoid making mistakes, you can reach out to helpful tutorials put up by Facebook management team to assist you.


Moving to the next step …………………………………………………….


Step Two


we proceed to create an advertisement for the business Facebook page of which we can personalize our ad settings to specific targets(audience).

To get started, we click the “Promote” button as shown in the last image above in step 1


– After clicking “promote”, it will take you to this image below to get started on setting up your ad for local internet marketing of your business.

There are 3 options involved as you can see below but the most appropriate to start with is the first one as indicated in red;


– After that, it will take you to the below image where you click the “Get Started” button to begin.


Clicking the button will lead you to a series of steps till you get to the most important of them all which is “where is your audience located


It is at this very point that you choose the very specific location where your target audience resides be it in a city, town or even rural villages.


After choosing your area, then you continue with the rest steps.


Once done, you see a similar portion of your ad settings as this below


As you can see above in the Audience details, you can certain group of persons; male, female of any age bracket in specific locations e.g. a town in indonesia and you can choose to edit the audience settings by simply clicking the indicated symbol above and it will take you to the settings below;


Once you are done, click the “save audience” button.


For better assistance on how to set up a successful Facebook ad campaign, visit this tutorial to put you through.


As far as social media is concerned, that will be all for now. So feel free to take maximum advantage of social media i.e. Facebook in particular to attract potential customers to your business locally.


If you wish to try another, LinkedIn is a fantastic site to lay your hands on.


Lets move on to the next local internet marketing tip


Google PPC Ads

While performing google keyword research, you must have subconsciously come across search result webpages with an “Ad” sign next to their website links and even click on them.


Surely, you may have wondered what they are but unbothered to know more about them.


Well, if so, they are Google advertisements called Google Pay-Per-Click Adwords


These advertisements are placed by business owners who bid for keywords for their websites to show up on google search results first page and aside recognizing them by the Ad sign, they usually occupy the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th position of such page.


To buttress our above statements, lets make use of this image below as our reference point.

We made a keyword research(:best web hosting for small business) and it displayed the results as shown below.


From our observation, we can see that;

  1. the result page shows us that 4 business websites(indicated by Ad) bidded for the keyword and are occupying positions 1-4.
    Note that they also appear at the bottom as well though rarely.(check it yourself)
  2. At the bottom of this first page, you will see your present location where you are browsing from. In this case, my current location shows shomolu Lagos, Nigeria


So, after all these episode, how does this connects with our topic of discussion?


Let me explain!


When setting up your google ads campaign, Google offers a unique feature where you can channel your ads to show up for searchers who are browsing from certain locations(which can be local or international)


This means that if you live in toronto otario in canada, you can target your PPC ads to only show for google users living in the same location where you are operating from.


Isnt that Local internet marketing in action?


Of course, yes!.


So, how do we set up such google ad campaign to target locations?


Lets run through the following steps;


Steps to set up Google local ads

Step 1: Create a Gmail account

To start with, you need a gmail account. create one if you don’t have any.


Step 2: Input all your business details

  • Click HERE to visit the google ad website.
  • Then, click “sign in” to get access. You can also use the “start now” tab.
  • after signing in, it will take you to the below image where you can start inputting your details step-by-step beginning with your business name.


Step 3: Create your local campaign

  • once you are done with the steps, you will be taken to a page similar as this image below.
  • first, click the campaigns tab
  • secondly, click the “blue-cross icon create campaign“. A dropdown menu appears, click “New campaign”.
  • After clicking “new campaign”, it will take you to this page below. click the “Local store visits and promotions” tab.
  • click the performance max, then type what you want to name your campaign. and click “continue”.
  • After clicking “continue”, it will ask if you want to start a new campaign or finish a saved draft. click “start new” to continue with the rest process.

    This local campaign guidelines will put you through.


Step 4: select your location(s)

Once you are done,…………….Now is the time to specify your locations where you want your google ads to be directed to.
In other words, allowing those within your location where you are operating your business to see your ad when they use keywords that you have bidded for.


For a better comprehension of setting up this local campaigns in google ads, lets watch this video together below;


With this video in summary form, i hope it will be able to put you through in setting up your local campaign successfully.


If you have any questions about this or anything relating to local internet marketing, drop them in the comments section below at the end of this article and i will respond to them in no time.


Final Thoughts On Local Internet Marketing

Yes, the world is getting globalized day-by-day.


I mean a lot of businesses now have the capability of going international, reaching out far and wide to every corner of the earth.


No doubt about that.


But this shouldn’t in anyway supersedes local internet marketing.


I say this because there are certain situations that may warrant you to go local rather than international if your aim is to attain maximum sales and profit.


Such circumstances are :

  1. When the product is peculiar to that region ONLY. For example, snowboard or ski jacket. Its wont make sense to export this jacket to Africa continent because they don’t practice such winter sports and besides, it doesn’t even snow in Africa.
  2. When the product is perishable. For example, there are edible fruits that must be sold for consumption within a short time or they go spoilt. In this case, you cannot afford to export them to other countries.
  3. When the product is season-based. Seasonal conditions apply to different countries, so when a product is in vogue, its just for a short period of time, hence it will be better its consumed within before it runs out of fashion.
  4. When you want your physical location known: If you go international only, then no need to potential customers to visit your physical store as they would rather book online. But if you go local, definitely your store will be one of the numerous contacts for your products.

So, if your products falls within any of these category, you have no choice than to practice it internet-wise.


And guess what?


You might not need to incur any transport or courier expenses in delivering your products to your customers for they will just locate your physical store and make purchases directly and even if you have to, it wont cost much, hence making local internet marketing a cost-effective strategy to implement for businesses.


Now, over to you

Are you going to leverage the power of local internet marketing on your business?

Or

Do you are planning of carrying out any of these tips for your business?

Do you have any questions about anything related to this topic at all?

Feel free to drop your comments; questions, recommendations, suggestions, criticisms, analysis and advice

I am 100% available to respond to your comments anytime, any day.

Thanks for your time, patience, endurance and attention.

Till I see you again in my next post, I remain your friendly neighborhood Spiderman.

Oppp! Sorry.

Your friendly neighborhood SEO and online wealth tutor.

winks

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