If you are a business owner in 2013, and you’re looking to increase sales and profits, then it’s important that you have a sound local internet marketing strategy. Search has gone local, so businesses need to turn their only strategies to local search, in order to take advantage of increased online exposure.
The Key to Local Search Success
It’s not just enough to purchase all the right marketing tools, it’s important that you or your SEO team stay on top of all the latest trends in local search marketing. Many of the new local search trends will be enhancements to trends from the previous year, but many still will be brand new. Here is a list of local search marketing trends to watch.
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Boost in Local Search Tools
With the upgrades to the Google Places Dashboard, Google+ for Business, and Analytics tracking, local business owners will have more tools at their disposal. Using these tools will allow you to expose your business to the numerous potential customers who are performing local search queries. You can even take it to the next level by analyzing your performance on all of the major search engine sites using analytics tracking. Some key metrics you can analyze include:
How many people visited your site per month?
Which sites have the highest referral traffic to your company’s site?
What is the average number of pages viewed per visit?
Which landing pages on your site are viewed the most?
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Use Google for Local Search Marketing
Google remains the largest search engine and the search engine of choice for most people. While it is important for SEOs to optimize local business listings across all search engines, directories, and others, Google is still the place to begin your local search marketing strategy. Google has made an emphasis on local search, and it has released the tools to allow local business owners to put an emphasis on local search results.
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Social Media Now Affects Local Search
While Google has pushed Google+ and local business listings, Facebook and Twitter have also launched efforts to help people and business owners take advantage of local search marketing trends. An example of this would be Facebook’s recent launch of “Graph Search”. A sound local social media marketing strategy will be noticed by Google and positively affect you local search rankings.
It is every bit as important to pay attention to the trends in local search around you, as it is to actually implement the latest and greatest local internet marketing strategies.
For nearly three decades, Chris Marentis, founder and CEO of Surefire Social, has been responsible for driving innovation and sales growth for large media and e-commerce brands as well as start-ups. With a long-history of counseling local businesses about their marketing efforts, Marentis provides insight on what it takes for small businesses to succeed and thrive in today’s evolving digital environment. His notable career includes creating the foundational blueprints for online marketing, e-commerce and content branding for AOL's Interactive Marketing group, where he served as Senior Vice President. While CEO of Clearspring Technologies, Marentis developed one of the most widely adopted venture-backed Web 2.0 technology platforms. Marentis is a frequent speaker at local digital marketing conferences and a contributor to SMB and technology-focused publications.
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Berton
April 9, 2013 at 1:05 am
What an amazing post. It is really interesting and very informative. I have learn a lot of things about it and the author was so brilliant and very smart to post like this.
CBIL360
April 9, 2013 at 6:51 am
As search engine algorithms – It’s tending more to local area while you search anything then you will result out mostly local search result in order to give you better result and help to searcher who are looking for specific with ease.
Just Go Locally To Grab Local Market.
Rohit
April 9, 2013 at 7:18 am
a very nice and fresh article Chris,
Google has gone local, and now the small entrepreneurs could get the help of google to spread their business to the new heights..,
this is the most fundamental and essential step taken by google, and it will help millions..
very informative article..:)
Anand Hittinali
April 9, 2013 at 12:12 pm
google has surly helped many in their marketing and local business personals. thanks for this wonderful post.
Luis
April 12, 2013 at 1:56 am
Great article Chris, I was unaware of how much Google had chaned in the local sense. I’ll be rethinking my SEO strategy now.