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5 Local Search Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Marketing a local business is a little more difficult than marketing to a global audience. Your focus needs to be more specific, not only with your target audience but also within your geographic area. For best results with your local search marketing, try your best to avoid these mistakes.

1. One Page for Multiple Locations – If your business has more than one location, you need to have more than one location page on your website (or local subpages); Facebook; Twitter; and any other platform. If it’s your corporate website, you can have a primary corporate address listed, but each location needs to be a separate page. That way, each can be marketed to the search engines separately and with the appropriate location-specific keywords.
2. Unfriendly Communication – Communication and customer dialog is important to every business and it may be even more important to local business owners. No matter what type of fantastic content you create, though, you’ll have at least one or two people occasionally leave negative remarks. And even though it may be undeserved, your response should be postitive . Take a step back, take the high road and respond with friendliness and professionalism. Ask someone to read your response before you send it if you aren’t sure you’ve cooled down enough – or wait until the next day to reply.
3. Forcing Content to Be Viral – We all want to have a blog post or piece of social media content become really popular and go viral. Unfortunately some local marketers are so inpatient, they take it as far as creating a piece of content that is forced and off-topic, which is really nothing more than a gimmick. Ultimately, any type of marketing that doesn’t actually build your brand, work at building their trust, or sell your product is a waste of your time and money – even if it is fun.
4. You Forgot to List Your Business with Local DIrectories – Local business listing sites are incredibly important to your online marketing efforts. Google, Yelp, and a myriad of other local business directories should have at least the basics about your business. You don’t need to pay all of these sites for advertising, but you do need to have the same presence in multiple places so you can be found when people use the directories for searches.
5. Spam, Spam, Spam – It’s more than canned ham. Don’t spam your own website with city or keyword tags. Allow them to occur naturally in the appropriate manner. The old practice of creating a list of words separated by commas and thinking your page is optimized is dead. Forget it. Create great content, naturally incorporate your keyword a couple of times, and call it a day.

Need help with your online marketing efforts? WSI New Media Marketing can help you put together a local marketing plan that will take your business to the next level. Get in touch today for a consultation.