E/Power Marketing has helped tons of businesses throughout the Fox Cities (and beyond) grow their business through proven digital marketing solutions. Over the years, we’ve worked with internationally based businesses, brands with a global audience, and businesses with such specific territories, we really exercised our map-reading skills! Businesses with a focus on their community, who serve a primarily local audience, have some specific challenges and opportunities when it comes to digital marketing success! As we have shifted our focus back to helping the businesses in and around the Fox Valley, we’ve had some great conversations with business owners asking about how they can best reach their local audience online. In this article, you’ll learn more about why local search engine optimization (SEO) is important for your business, as well as some of the things we do to help local businesses succeed.
Why SEO is Important for Local Businesses
Local SEO helps businesses that have physical locations or a more focused service area reach their target audience. The big brands that ship anywhere don’t have to worry so much about spinning their wheels online. Not that they don’t have their own challenges finding success online, but they have a larger playing field! Local businesses don’t want to waste time or resources marketing to everyone online, and they don’t have to! Local SEO is a huge piece of the puzzle for local businesses, it will help get your business in front of more people in your area, whether it be on-page (getting your website ranking higher) or off-page (getting your Google Maps listing to show up).
Some more reasons you should care about your local SEO:
- 97% of people learn more about your company online than anywhere else. So it’s important to have your website, business listings, social media, and any other online resources frequently updated. Having descriptive, up-to-date information will make you more appealing to potential customers. This has never been more true that in today’s new normal!
- 46% of Google searches are local searches. There are billions of searches done on Google every day, and almost half of those are local searches. You’ll want your website properly optimized, so new customers in your area can discover you! If you have no online presence through your website or directory listings, then your competition will have a much larger advantage.
- 88% of those that performed local searches will visit or call business within 24 hours. Not only is it important that new (and returning) customers can find your business online, but they should also be able to find your contact information, so they can follow up with you. Things are still changing quickly for businesses, let your customers know when you’re open, how you’re operating and what they can expect from your business!
As voice-assisted devices are becoming a constant in everyday life (with nearly 111.8 million in use), it’s also becoming even more important than ever to have a well-positioned website. Many voice searches include “near me”, so SEO and voice search optimization go hand in hand when it comes to optimizing for local.
How E/Power Helps Local Businesses in the Fox Valley
E/Power Marketing’s SEO team is dedicated to ensuring you have a well-rounded web presence, so you can show up for local searches. While we make sure all websites we work with are technically sound so they can be found by search engines and users, there are some additional things that we do that are specific to local SEO including:
Local SEO Content
Unique, well-written content is a must for all websites. However, great content won’t help much if you’re not writing for the right audience or not using the right keywords. Both search engines and users need to understand where you’re located or where your service area is. This means that you need to naturally use location terms within your content, so people searching for something like “marketing agencies near me” or “digital marketing in Oshkosh” can easily see that you are able to work with them.
E/Power Marketing’s team will perform competitor analysis and key phrase research to ensure we’re building content that your audience wants to see, then developing great, well-optimized content that will get you better visibility for the searches that matter most. We’ll also work with you on persona development to ensure we’re using the right terminology to speak to your target market. It’s all in the details when it comes to great digital marketing!
More On-Page Optimization
In addition to written content, our SEO team makes sure that other critical on-page SEO elements are in place and properly optimized. This is where things get a little technical, and where our SEO team really shines! Getting the right content up is important, but the other details, like your metadata, internal linking, and site architecture also make a big difference in your results. We also use Schema markup that is specific to local businesses. Local Schema markup includes important information about your business like your company name, address, phone number, logo, and hours of operation.
All of these elements are important for telling the search engine crawlers what your website is about and what pages are most important. The metadata and schema markup will also help users understand what your site is about right from the search engine results page, so it’s important that these elements are optimized and stand out from your competition. While a lot of this work is done in the backend, and usually not even visible to your audiences, it makes a huge impact on where and how you show up on the search results.
Business Listing Optimization
E/Power Marketing also focuses on off-page SEO like business listing optimization. So you don’t send mixed signals to Google and risk the wrong information showing up for users, it’s important to have consistent information on not only your website but also online directories and listings like Google Maps. The common industry terminology is NAP+W – this means that your company Name, Address, Phone number, and Website links should be consistent in as many places as possible across the web including your site, social media accounts, Google Maps, Bing Maps, local directories, and more. Consistency adds up, and tells the search engines that your business means business! When they can verify your information, they’re more likely to serve it to searchers!
Need Help Improving Your Local Visibility? We Can Help!
If you’re having trouble standing out online, let E/Power Marketing perform a digital marketing opportunity analysis and help you get started! We’re tired of hearing about local businesses that have been taken advantage of by other agencies, and want to help our neighbors and fellow businesses win more business online! Our team will take a look at what’s working for you, and what’s working against you right now, to find new opportunities for success online!
