How to Establish an Online Presence at a New Location
Breaking into a new geographical location can pose a challenge for small businesses. If you don’t have a well-known brand, you’ll need to get yourself out in front of those possible customers that are located in the proximity of your new location.
With online marketing analytics, we’re able to track the volume of traffic coming from specific locations to our client’s site. Here are the top three ways we’ve found we’ve been able to promote new locations.
Complete and Accurate Business Page Profiles
Search engines look to online business directories to help verify the validity of businesses, as well look for indications on how they should rank a business result. At the very least, it is a MUST to have a Google+ page for you business, as this Google’s very own platform. If you don’t have one created, Google may still publish information on a listing for you, but you will have no control over the content.
Establish your business pages on Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Be sure that your business address and contact information that is listed on your website matches those found in all of the listings. The more accurate information that Google’s crawlers find on your business, the more confident they are that the results are correct.
Location Specific Content
Having local specific content on your website will further increase the association that search engines like Google will make with your business and your location. Your physical address should be on your website, typically in your footer and/or the contact page.
Additional local content can be used in addition to your address to indicate your local service areas. This includes using city names in your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. If you have individual pages that talk about local happenings, or the city/cities you serve, that’s gravy on top. Just keep in mind not to overplay the local content. It is bad user experience to overuse keywords, and can actually cause a penalization by the search engines in the long-run. Make sure your use of local keywords is natural.
Local Targeted Paid Social Media Promotions
To pack a powerful punch, sometimes it helps to pay. Social media platforms offer up paid advertising options, with incredible local targeting capabilities.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all offer options in paid promotion. I’ve found the boosted posts about a new location opening, or a local event you’re hosting, or just even a sales promotion, can get extraordinary results with a minimal amount of paid effort. Just select a post that you think will resonate with your visitors, and make the audience targeting for the advertisement specific to the geographic location you want to attract.
