Advertising your business locally is critical to developing your brand and reaching your target audience. Local business advertising doesn’t just mean posting a flier on the community bulletin board or taking out an ad in the town paper. Even the smallest operations benefit big from online local listings.
If you’re wondering whether it’s worth it to claim your business on online local directories, consider this: more than 90 percent of consumers use search engines to find local businesses. That’s a lot of potential new customers!
Here’s why you should rethink updating your information on local listing directories.
Boost your search ranking
Put simply, the more places that reference your business and your website online, the higher search engines like Google will rank your business. Search engines look for any mention of your business’ name, address and phone number to form a picture of your business.
If this information isn’t consistent, the search engine might think your business is two separate businesses, or worse, a scam. When your business is fully represented in multiple places across the Internet, search engines are more likely to promote it.
Increase web traffic
When your business is higher in search rankings, more people will visit your website. Users are much more likely to click on the first couple of search results. If your business is all the way on the second page, you can forget about attracting customers.
Enjoy low-cost marketing
Many of the options you consider for marketing your business can be quite costly and time consuming. Fortunately, it’s either free or very low cost to have your business featured in an online directory.
It’s free to claim your business’ page on sites like Google My Business and Yelp. The benefit of claiming your business on Google is that it will also help your business to appear on Google Maps. If you have the budget, you can pay to have your business featured more prominently on these platforms. This is an easy way to market without designing an entire creative campaign.
Grow your social following
If you post frequently on your social channels, you can cross promote these pages from your local listing. The listing usually contains a space for you to link not only your website, but also your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Again, this increases the likelihood that your business is discovered across search results.
Navigating the world of online marketing sounds intimidating, but there are simple steps you can take to boost your website’s discoverability to your audience.
To learn more about how you can improve your website’s performance, contact IDMI.Net.