Paid ads, social media, affiliate marketing, content strategies, local SEO. With so many options of what we choose to do for our marketing strategy, why choose local SEO?
Facebook ads are a great way to push your leads down the sales funnel.
Social media does a fantastic job of nurturing your leads until they’re ready to take the next step.
Affiliate marketing is amazing for gaining trust with your audience.
A solid content strategy is the key to gaining authority.
But Local SEO is the foundation for all of this.
For the purpose of this analogy, we’re going to pretend that you’re business is asking your audience out on a date from your dating app of choice (probably Tinder, right?)
What’s the first thing we all did when we were asked out by someone we didn’t know?
We Googled them.
What did you see? Could you find them?
Do they live 100 miles away? Have they robbed an old lady? Have they committed a felony?
Or can you find where they got their education? Can you see where they work? Did they save a puppy from a burning building?
This is precisely what a local SEO strategy (or lack of one) does for your business.
Having a solid SEO strategy means that your business shows up in local search when keywords related to your business are searched. This could mean any of the pages on your website, backlinks (other sites that link to yours), PR, your socials, etc.
Not having a solid SEO strategy means that when we search these same keywords, all we see are your competitors, literally causing you to lose out on revenue.
Local SEO is the foundation of all of these strategies. If your business is not showing up in local search when they search “[insert your type of business here] near me” or [insert what you sell] in my city,” then you’re honestly losing out on so many opportunities.
Paid ad campaigns typically only run for short periods of time, meaning that once they end, you’re stuck with your organic local search results.
Social media is great for nurturing leads that already know you exist. Again they are likely going to find us through a quick search on Google rather than on Instagram.
Affiliate marketing is also for the leads that already know you exist, not gaining new leads.
A solid content strategy can definitely be a vital piece to your local SEO strategy, but again it’s only one piece.
Brightlocal has a brilliant guide to local SEO basics if you’d like to learn more about how it can help your business.
If your answer is the latter, then I’d suggest you download my guide to optimizing your Google My Business profile (33% of the reason you rank in the local pack) today.