Local online presence for small and medium sized businesses is extremely important. It should be at the front of your priorities in your 2021 marketing list. Our approach at Top Results Consulting (TRC) is to provide online presence, but in a smart way compared to other digital marketing agencies. We use local marketing in conjunction with inbound marketing because, in our experience, it has better results than the traditional outbound marketing approach. Basically, inbound marketing is to attract people into your business, engage with your potential customers, and delight them.
Why inbound marketing?
Customers are sitting at home and are searching online options before making a purchase. It is your job to go and bring them into your business. They are already searching, which is doing the heavy lifting. SEO is needed for inbound marketing and it all starts with keyword research. In this context, keywords are the terms potential customers are searching for Google. You, the business owner, need to look for those terms to create a strategy.
At TRC, we use different strategies for creating optimal SEO:
- Keywords: As mentioned above, these are the popular terms on Google.
- Content: Creating a good user experience is the key to success! Also, add good content to set yourself apart from the competition in the “About” page. The “About” page helps create your own branding resulting in making a personal or psychological connection with the client.
- Service Pages: This is the place where business owners answer a lot of questions about their services or products. It cannot be one sentence and a picture! These pages have to be very detailed about what services or products entrepreneurs offer.
- Blogs: This strategy is focused on answering questions and interlinking the blogs to product and services pages.
Following these strategies will result in a good website architecture. Basically, you are connecting the dots to make your website user friendly… and guess what? Google loves it! Google sees you are a resource with valuable content.
Now, after SEO, comes social media. Social media is a must for business owners because that is how clients are going to be aware of your business. The first thing a potential client does is to look up a business online. Customers want to educate themselves on a company and, as you might assume, every potential client is on social media. Businesses gain psychological trust on social media. As a result, the business owner amplifies it brand name, which will help with your Google search rankings.
A third approach is Pay-Per-Click (PPC), also known as paid ads. This is complementary to the organic marketing campaign: a well-designed website architecture, social media, and effective SEO.
The last two approaches work in conjunction with each other, they are landing pages and content marketing. Content marketing is anywhere you are delivering information about your service or product, such as youtube videos, podcasts, blogs, or Facebook lives. Now, how can a business owner maximize this space? One place is the landing page.
You need to remember landing pages need a call to action to make it work and get the customers to get to the subscribe page. Landing pages are educational pages as well with good value; however do not distract the customer with other elements of the website or unrelated content. After the prospect client visits the landing page and the subscribe page, the website can send them to a thank you page after they opt-in. The objective of this is to take the most out of the traffic on your website. On the thank you page, you can introduce the customer to more content, which will increase the trust if the potential customer continues to learn from the business website.
