Small Business Saturday is fast approaching on November 25th. If you run a local business, you should already be ramping up your online visibility. Making your business more discoverable online could give you a substantial edge in terms of brand recognition and sales. But it takes time to build that momentum. Media Relations Agency uses local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and other proven strategies to help local businesses like yours get more leads and higher sales. We call this Best in Market.
Why Small Business Saturday is an ideal strategic launching point
Running a business is tough. Nearly 1 in 5 small businesses fail in their first year for a multitude of reasons. Even if you survive your first year: If you don’t have a strong local SEO (search engine optimization) strategy to keep up with your leads, develop a returning customer base, and be discoverable online, you’ll find that these issues may sink your business in the long run. Media Relations Agency’s goal is to help you find the Best in Market strategy for your business that will connect you with your community, grow your business, and help keep you getting discovered for years to come. Many people prefer to shop locally from their devices, even on Small Business Saturday.
What is Local SEO?
SEO is the process of making your website more relevant to potential customers, resulting in your site appearing higher on the search engine results page. A strong local SEO focuses on making your business more discoverable by people in your local demographic, who are searching for products and services like yours.
Treat your website like a physical property. For example: You can buy a building for a physical store, make it look really modern and nice, and then fill it with all of your products, but if you place that store in the middle of a field, miles away from the nearest highway, it is unlikely to attract many customers.
A website is similar to a physical store if you consider search engines, social media platforms, and advertising to be the SEO ‘roads’ that connect to your site. The more roads you have leading directly to your website, the easier you will be found.
Our Media Relations Agency team approaches this process like we’re marketing high-end stores. You’ve put in a lot of hard work to get your business to where it is today. We help make sure more people know about your business and products, and that there are several digital ‘roads’ connecting with your website.
What you’ll get with our Local SEO strategy
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- We start by setting up a Google Business Profile. Letting Google know you exist is crucial to your prospective customers finding you online. Approximately 85% of consumers report using the internet to find local businesses. Considering that Google accounts for nearly 92% of the search engine market and has roughly 8.5 billion searches per day, it’s safe to say that people are searching for a business like yours. Depending on your market, setting up a Google Business Profile can get you appearing in search results quickly. We make sure all the information is there, and that it’s all relevant to your customers.
- We will strengthen your active social media presence. We will work with you to build a winning social media strategy that will get people sharing and talking about your product. Options may include targeting specific locations and demographics to strengthen your awareness with local customers; or we may suggest an influencer campaign with local influencers. A robust tagging and hashtag program, combined with keyword optimization, will help more potential customers see your great content.
- We can also design landing pages to connect with PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns. PPC ads can be an affordable way to draw in clicks to your website or social media channels. Media Relations Agency takes the time to set up your ads and associated landing pages with the proper imagery and keywords to draw customers to the pages we want them to see, and keep them on your site to learn more. We will also run your ads through an AI system to ensure they are set up correctly.
- We create a plan to get local reviews from your customers. Review sites are an important way to get your customers talking about you. Google has become the most trusted source for reviews, and a positive review gives 69% of consumers a positive impression of your business. Think about your own experience searching for businesses or buying products online. How often do reviews play an important factor in your decision? We’ll work with you on a plan to get customer reviews. We create links that take customers directly to your review profiles so that leaving a review is simple and quick. We’ll also strategize with you some different ways to incentivize customers to leave reviews.
It takes time for these strategies to build momentum. If you want to take advantage of Small Business Saturday to increase leads and develop a strong customer base, you need to start building an online presence that has multiple avenues of discoverability today. Start now and you could get a couple months of local SEO growth before Small Business Saturday.
If you have a physical store, you likely spent hours researching the best possible building location. Treat your online presence with the same care. As a Product Publicist, I will invest countless hours learning your business and researching every metaphorical road and highway we can connect with your website, so you can focus on running your business.
To start building your local SEO before Small Business Saturday, complete this form or pick up the phone and call us at 952-697-5269. Please let us know how we can help you!
