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Sarah Giometti: Hi everyone, Sarah Giometti here. And in today’s video, I wanna talk about how to market your local business online.
Whenever I talk to a small local business owner, there are four strategies that I always recommend, and I always recommend them in a very specific order, and here’s why. Local businesses tend to have a more limited budget than say a national company. And you wanna make sure that your marketing dollars are working for you in the best possible way. And so these strategies are meant to be built upon. The foundation and the one thing when I recommend, if you do nothing but one thing, this is the one thing you should do, and that is a local SEO Google Maps-focused strategy. That is the foundation of everything local online. When people are doing local searches for businesses near them or in that city, the Google Maps 3-Pack is usually what shows up first. And so as a local business, your goal is to get in that 3-Pack as often as possible, for as many keyword phrases as you possibly can for your geographical location of where you’re targeting businesses. So that and that alone is the number one strategy that if you do nothing else, do that.
What is also often tied in with that, and at least it is in our services when we offer local SEO for businesses, is a review or reputation management system. You wanna make sure, if you’re getting in that Maps 3-Pack, that you actually have a lot or a fair amount of good positive high quality reviews, which means you wanna be in the four to five star range, ’cause think about it, when’s last time you picked a one-star restaurant? Never. And none of your customers are gonna pick a one-star or no star business either, especially if your competition is showing up in that map 3-Pack with you and they have a whole bunch of reviews that put them in the four to five-star range. So coupled with the local SEO strategy should be a pro-active strategic review and reputation management system.
Next, if you wanna get a little bit more advanced and you wanna add to the strategy and have it be more powerful and work better and longer and stronger, is creating content, and that includes videos and/or blogs. I do both. I do written blogs and videos. Not everybody is comfortable in video, but here’s the problem, or here’s the huge benefit of video over written content, is videos are extremely powerful. If you’re watching my videos, you’re probably starting to feel like you kind of know me or you feel comfortable with me, you’re learning from me, so I’m showing you that I have some expertise in these specific areas. Your customers will feel the same way. And when you starting videos and you’re talking to them and you’re teaching them about your services or your products, the more they watch, the longer they watch, the more they feel comfortable with you and they feel like your expert they want to hire. And that all comes through video; that doesn’t necessarily come through print.
You can write articles and teach people that way, but it’s not as powerful as what people will feel is kind of face-to-face with a video. So I would highly recommend considering video. We do have strategies that we can help you with that. And if you really, really are adamant about not being in videos, see if you have an employee that is willing to be on video, or maybe some customer testimonials. Those will help as well. But if you absolutely are anti-video, then hire a writer or write them yourself and write blog articles, ’cause at least you’re adding authority and education to your website.
So those are the top four strategies that I always recommend for local businesses for marketing online, is a local SEO Google Maps strategy, a review or reputation management strategy, then get into content creation, whether it be blogs or videos and/or blogs, and definitely do them in that order. So if you do nothing else, do local SEO first. I hope you found this video useful, if you got any questions to follow up on that, feel free to drop them below and I’ll get back to you. If you liked this video and you’d like to watch more of mine, I would love for you to subscribe to my channel. And if you’re really wondering what your business is doing online, I’ve got a link in the description below where you can take a local SEO audit, and you’ll get an actual tangible report that will go through your local SEO strategy or performance online, and it gives you something that you can, if you go looking for digital marketing help or local SEO help, you can take that report, or keep it to yourself and ask some questions based on that and see if they’re a good fit for you. So thank you for watching this video and I hope I’ll see you in another one. Have a great day.
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