Many small business owners struggle to find effective ways for their local business advertising. Some time ago I created a post about local SEO for small business; today, instead, I would like to share some Digital Marketing tips to advertise your business locally, with a limited budget.

  1. The first tip, which sounds obvious to me, but I know many business owners are not so sure it is necessary, is that you need to have a website. Even if your business is very small and very local, even if you’re already getting a good response from your Social Media channels, your prospective customers must find you through Google, too. Even if you don’t have a very high budget, it is really possible to get a very good looking website, which must work perfectly on mobile, load very fast and offer to your target audience what they are looking for, when they are looking for products and services same as the ones you produce or offer. Contact us to get to know more about the possible options.
  2. If you already have a website, my tip numer two for local business advertising is to audit your online presence, your conversion rate (which means how many of your website visitors become customers or complete whatever action you wished for, be it a download or a contact), which can be acknowledged by Google Analytics,  and your engagement metrics, like good average time on site, good pages per session, etc.
  3. Review (and enhance as much as you can!) your backlink profile from Google Search Console or from a Backlinks Check. When Google needs to decide which website to rank on its first page, it has so many competitors’ sites to choose from. It is the same that happens when we need to choose a professional assistance for some service. We rely on suggestions, referrals, word-of-mouth (the more relevant to us, the more important their suggestion is). Likewise, Google relies heavily on third-party suggestions, linking to your website, if they are good quality (not sketchy) websites, linking you inside of a good editorial content page. This is the reason why you should try and get as many as possible of these, to increase your ranking on Google. 
  4. Audit your website in its structure and its keyword optimisation. It is impossible to rank for some specific keyword if it is not present on your page, in the right places, even in 2018, even if Google is becoming more and more efficient in inferring relationships between words. Your website must also be easy to be crawled by Google bots, with no errors or malfunctions which would let RankBrain consider it a low-quality website, not worth to be shown in a prominent position among the results. The structure must be flawless, perfectly SEO friendly.
  5. Get all your Social Media channels set up, optimised and active, and as many good reviews as you can. People look for social proof: the reason why word-of-mouth is so important is that we all want to feel secure about who we do business with and reviews are a huge part of your online presence. The purchased product in your e-commerce, your Google Local Business, Facebook and Yelp profiles are the ones to prioritise. The best way to obtain reviews is… to ask for them! Get the healthy habit to e-mail your customers, asking them to leave a review, not too long after they purchased your services or products (better not to wait for more than one, so they still have a fresh memory of your benefits). Make it as easy as possible for them to write, providing easy links to write on, with your Facebook Page or purchased product’s link. Most businesses do not ask for reviews and this can be your advantage: when you show up in Google and there are many competitors if you have the most (positive) reviews, you will gain the prospective customer’s interest.

These five fundamentals of local business advertising will get you ahead of 95% of your competitors, giving you really the opportunity to stand out, gain visibility and trustworthiness from your targeted audience.

Do you already use some of these local business advertising techniques? Which results do you get? Share your experiences, and eventual doubts, in the comments!

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5 Local Business Advertising ideas that 95% of your competitors don't have
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5 Local Business Advertising ideas that 95% of your competitors don't have
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If you, like most small business owners, struggle to find effective ways for your local business advertising, check these 5 Local Business Advertising ideas that will get you ahead of 95% of your competitors.
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PinkSEO.Marketing
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