Category: Technology

Local Small Business Online Marketing Checklist

The marketing landscape for local business has changed dramatically. Smart business owners, like you, are relying less on print and traditional media advertisements and are instead embracing the power of the Internet and mobile technology. Consider this your checklist for ensuring you have all your bases covered when it comes to marketing your business locally.

Your Business Website

If you don’t have a website, now is the time to create one. Your potential customers are searching for you online and they want to see your operating hours, address, catalog or menu before they visit you. If they can’t find you, they’re likely to move onto the next business that readily provides the information they’re looking for.

Your website needn’t be complicated, but should include the following:

• Hours of operation
•   Catalog / Menus and Pricing, where possible
• Any specials you are currently offering
•  Contact information including address, phone number and email address
• An interactive map to help users navigate to your place of business (Use Google Maps)
•  ”About Us” information about your company
• Customer / Client satisfaction and testimonials information
•  Website privacy policy and other legal documentation

Search Engine Traffic

There is plenty of potential for local traffic from search engines. Whether your customer is searching for your business name or searching for the type of service you offer in your local area, this is highly targeted traffic.

Free Search Engine Traffic: Most of the business listings you see in a search engine are free and businesses do not pay to be listed there. Search engines use a complex algorithm to determine which pages are relevant for each search its users make. For example, if a user searches for “kids clothing boutique Raleigh, North Carolina” and you happen to own a kid’s clothing boutique in that city, you’re more likely to be found, provided that your website is descriptive and includes those keyword phrases.

Main Search Listings: Always be descriptive when creating your website pages. Include your complete address on each page and describe your products and services. Make sure you or your web designer also includes descriptive keywords in your title, description and headline tags. If you are building your site yourself, find out how you can modify your title, description and headline tags as the method varies depending on the type of design tool you are using.

Google Places: On Google, you may have noticed that there are Places results that often appear before the other listings. These listings are based on sites that have been added to the Google Places database and they are ranked according to a number of factors including how often your business is mentioned on other websites, reviews and how frequently your Places page is updated.

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