Some doctors and other healthcare professionals have a strong online presence.
Did you know that local lobster fishermen in Nova Scotia, Canada, have found new customers in Japan in recent years. All due to a clever online marketing strategy.
If you are a local business owner, part of your online marketing strategy should be to make sure that your business is listed everywhere it should be. Read on to see where you should begin.
1. Contact Page, Don’t Overlook it!
Creating a “contact us” page on your website helps local customers find you. You can add a professional photo of your business and place it squarely on your “contact us” page. Link to Google maps. A comprehensive “contact us” page is a way to show your community exactly where you are and how to find you. Code it with schema.
2. Be Found Easier
The easiest thing that you can do to help members of your community find you is to list your complete address on every page of your site. This is part of local listing optimization and will help ensure that people who search for a business in your category is presented with your name. Once again, use Schema markup to increase visibility.
3. Don’t Forget Bing Local
Sure, Google is the big kid on the block when it comes to search engines. But a comprehensive online marketing strategy means taking advantage of tools such as Bing Local which exist to help local businesses be found by those looking for them.
4. Yellow Pages Online Benefit Doctors and Similar
The days of thumbing through the yellow pages which have been bound in a massive volume have left us. But they are still an active, much-used tool online. Again, you want potential customers to find you no matter where they look.
5. MapQuest
MapQuest is not just for looking up locations any more. They list profiles of local businesses on their site. And, according to the good folks at SEOmoz, MapQuest received over 40 million visitors in May of 2011. You certainly want to be a presence on a site that is of such a high profile.
This article has pointed out some basic things that you can do to improve your online marketing strategy. You need to keep abreast of what sites are important for local searches and ensure that you have a professional presence on all of the most high-profile sites.
A closing word. You should make sure that all of the online information about your business is accurate. If you change your operating hours, be sure to make that change everywhere. Consistency is the key to success.