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Reach Local – Drive More Local Business in 2018
The online marketplace can be highly effective in driving local, targeted traffic to your website. There are many ways to capture a local audience, and a great place to start is Google.
Google can help you to achieve your goal through organic search as well as through Pay Per Click (Google Adwords).
We advise that a business targeting a local audience invests in a combined approach of applying SEO to attract local organic traffic, and a PPC campaign that will capture users searching on more specific keywords. This combined approach will enable you to achieve a wider reach on a greater number of keywords, which will result in higher impression share, greater brand visibility in Google and higher volumes of targeted traffic reaching the site.
On-site SEO to reach a local audience
When a user searches for a product, service or business on a mobile device, their location will be taken into account when Google returns the search results. If the user has specified a particular location in their search query, this will override the user’s current location and the search results will be specific to the search query.
In optimising a website to attract more local traffic, the goal will be to create more relevance to the bricks and mortar location of the business. This means adding a geographic reference throughout the site to include the town and/or county where the business is located. This will need to be added through all content, not just text, but to also be referenced through image titles and descriptions, meta tags, link text, headlines and if possible, the navigation and page urls. Local Business Structured Data Markup can also be added to help search crawlers easily identify your business location.
Once your site is optimised in this way, it becomes more relevant to people searching for the products and services you offer, particularly if they are local to your business.
Google My Business Listing
A GMB listing will put your business on the Google Map. This helps to enhance the local organic visibility of your business, and over time this listing can accrue rank much like your main website listing. This local search listing can be a strong traffic driver, particularly for mobile traffic. You can help this listing to accrue rank by encouraging your customers to post reviews on Google, by adding photos and keeping the listing updated and well maintained.
PPC – Google Adwords
Google Adwords has a wide range of targeting options, and applying geographical targeting to your campaign will ensure your ads are only shown to people in your target location. You can specify a target radius around your business, for example setting a 5 mile radius means the ads will only show to people searching for the products/services you offer in that region, or you can specify postcodes.
There is also an option to link your Google Ad Campaign to your Google My Business listing through the Location Extensions tool, and this will help your ads to achieve more local prominence and will show your business location with the map marker alongside the ad.
Whizz Mahttps://whizzmarketing.co.uk/rketing is a Google Partner Agency and Louise is an Accredited Google Advertising Specialist and SEO Consultant. If you would like some support in generating more local business in 2018, please get in touch. www.whizzmarketing.co.uk or email louise@whizzmarketing.co.uk.
Telephone No.01252 622129
