Most purchase journeys today begin with a Google search. This is true for both offline and online purchases. In most cases, the consumer is likely to choose the option with the highest visibility and fastest availability.
This is why it is important for local businesses to look at local search expertise. You already have the advantage of unmatched delivery times — coupling this excellent local search presence can help you gain access to an untapped pool of consumers.
In fact, 44% of online purchase journeys start from a search engine, rather than dedicated apps or websites. A local business with excellent online presence can easily tap into this market and divert a part of them to their store. With consumers being increasingly active in this digital last mile, having prominent local presence online unlocks lucrative opportunities for businesses today.
Optimizing Local Search Presence – Strategies And Tools
Local presence is critical for offline businesses to stay competitive and increase revenue. With consumers searching online for easily accessible products and services, robust approaches are key to successful outcome-oriented local digital presence.
You should have optimized strategies that are in sync with current ranking metrics and guaranteed to provide results. This can be achieved by using local business-specific product solutions. They can help you implement these strategies economically.
Let us explore a few strategies that can help you master local search:
Optimize Your Google Business Profile
By creating a Google My Business account, you can edit information for your Google Business Profile. This is the first point of interaction for most consumers and is the first thing you should tackle while looking to master local search.
Your Google Business Profile should contain your correct location, updated photos, business hours, and contact information. You also need to make sure that this information is up-to-date and correct.
Doing this manually is possible, but requires dedicated personnel to manage your online presence.
You can use SingleInterface to automate processes such as updating your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), optimizing product listings, and fine-tuning on and off-page SEO. As an added advantage, this approach ensures that your business listing is always updated to keep up with the latest search algorithms.
Pay Attention To Reviews And Ratings
How much engagement your local business listing gets is important for search ranking and consumer trust.
Too few reviews show a lack of credibility, and too many reviews being left unanswered show a lack of consumer support. With sentiment analysis capabilities now being built with search engines, they will rank businesses according to the overall consumer perception of your business.
Automated tools can be used for tracking consumer sentiment and responding to general queries. However, complex queries should still be handled by your support team. Engagement & Reputation Management features offered by SingleInterface can help you implement these automation and escalation features.
Develop Locally-Focused Content and Location Pages
For local businesses, accurate hyperlocal rankings are far more important than ranking in general. Even if your business location is showing up in searches, it is of no use if the consumer is far away. This usually happens when you are not using location-based SEO tactics.
Developing locally focused content and location pages can help you significantly improve visibility and discoverability.
For example, if you have a store in a certain city and your top search results are a few hundred kilometers away, it is unlikely to lead to conversions. Similarly, if you top search results on the other side of the city, people will generally choose closer alternatives.
The same holds true for the type of content you are publishing. You might be providing offers for a local festival or products targeted at people visiting a local attraction. In such cases, locally focussed content will increase conversions; but only if it is also showing up in hyperlocal search results.
Consistent NAP Citations Across Online Directories
Online directories are websites that list businesses, such as Google My Business and Yelp, while citations are mentions of your business’s NAP information on these sites.
Maintaining consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP) citations across online directories helps increase search rankings.
Uniform citations provide credibility to your business listings and help search engines associate each listing with your unique business.
Consistent NAP citations also improve credibility among customers and remove confusion caused by outdated and inconsistent information.
Managing Hyperlocal Presence For Multi-Location Businesses
If your business has a physical presence across multiple locations, you need to treat each location as a distinct entity. Due to the nature of hyperlocal trends, using the same strategy for multiple stores even in a single city will provide suboptimal results.
You can tackle this by collecting data at both the store and company-wide levels. Using this data, you can get business-wide and store-specific insights, which enables you to optimize operations at individual locations while simultaneously making company-wide changes.
However, implementing this can be a huge technical undertaking. This is where local business-specific product offerings such as SingleInterface can help you by quickly creating highly optimized listings and pages at scale, for each of your business locations.
It also lets you manage consumer queries and reviews from a centralized support team or a specific store, ensuring faster and better resolutions for consumers – as the issue is always escalated to the proper person.
Conclusion
Location-based search optimization is a necessity today to stay competitive against online players. As more local businesses are taking local search presence seriously and spending a significant chunk of their marketing budget on it, this space is becoming hyper-competitive.
Products offering end-to-end Presence Management features from the likes of SIngleInterface, which include data-backed ranking strategies custom-built for local businesses are the right choice for this use case.
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