As you seek to build a solid online presence for your business, whether you provide a professional service or a physical product, localization remains an important term. Yet, how can you know if you’re effectively reaching your target audience? The answer lies in analytics. Effective and efficient local SEO analytics for small businesses is a key component of building cost-effective marketing strategies as you seek to grow your business.
Understanding Local Customer Behavior
One key metric to spend some time analyzing is your local customer behavior. Where do they spend their time online? What search terms are they using? Which of your services are the most in-need by your target audience? How do they typically find your business?
Analytics will give you data to answer these questions. Use that data to create a persona about your ideal customer. This persona will guide your online marketing efforts. It does no good to market to YouTube if your target audience spends the majority of their time on Instagram.
Once you know your local customer preferences, create content and campaigns that target it.
Keep in mind that customer behavior is constantly changing. You can’t identify it now, set up your campaigns, and move on. You have to constantly readjust your marketing to reach the needs of your current batch of potential customers. Using tools designed to track customer behavior becomes essential.
Set Goals and KPIs
As you work to optimize your online presence through effective analytics, making goals will drive your efforts. For example, you could measure the number of check-ins per month or social media tags and posts from customers. New reviews or photos uploaded to Google are other metrics that can become goals.
As you decide what goals you want to have for your business, be sure to state specific key performance indicators (KPIs) you can track. These might include:
- Local leads
- Cost per lead
- New customers
- Leads-to-Appointments Ratio or Leads-to-Customer Ratio
- Conversion rate for various marketing platforms
- Review and ratings
- Interactions on Google Business Profile
- Local Search Ranking
Your goals and KPIs need to be measurable to help you stay on track. For example, you could say you want the number of check-ins per month to increase by 10%, or you could say that you want to add five new positive reviews this month. Write these down, as they will help you use your analytics more efficiently.
Track Local SEO Performance
Your analytics will allow you to monitor your search rankings in your local community. Some of the most valuable traffic you can gain as a small business owner is organic search traffic, so see what your numbers are here. If you find them falling short, or if you wish to improve them, adjust your SEO strategies to incorporate more local search and relevant search terms. Keep tracking these analytics to see if your new SEO strategies are working, or if you need to make additional adjustments.
Analyze Customer Engagement
Getting traffic is the first step, but the best traffic is engaged traffic. Track engagement on the localized content you post. From likes to comments to shares, analyze what is working. Try to duplicate that in future posts.
For your social media pages, monitor customer interactions with your page. If you have comments, respond to them to build engagement with your customers. If you get shares, pay attention to what is shared so you can create similar content that resonates with your audience.
Another important customer engagement metric is your click-through rate. When you post a local promotion, create an ad campaign on Google, or send out an email newsletter, are you getting people to click on the links and visit your page? If not, then make adjustments to make these advertising venues more appealing.
Assess Local Advertising ROI
As you look over your analytics to see what is working and what is not, remember to compare these facts to the cost of your local advertising campaigns. Figure out the ROI to ensure your local marketing efforts are paying off. If you have particularly high-performing campaigns or platforms, spend more of your marketing dollars there, and funnel it away from the ones that are failing to bring in revenue.
Remember, your goal with local SEO is not just to reach more people with your brand. It’s also to make money. Tracking ROI will ensure that you are, in fact, making money.
Implement Geotargeting Strategies
Geotargeting makes your campaigns more successful. In one study, email campaigns that were geotargeted received 62% more clicks than those not sent to a specific geographic location. Other marketing platforms have similar results. Your analytics will help you hone in on the best potential geotargeting strategies. You can be as specific as particular neighborhoods or zip codes, as long as you use analytics to choose the most lucrative areas.
Once you know the areas you wish to target, create promotions that reach that local demographic. Each advertising platform has specific tools that allow you to target specific geographic areas, so use these to hone in on those specific locations. The more specific and targeted, the more effective these campaigns will be.
By using geotargeting strategies, you avoid the temptation to overspend. Marketing to too large of an audience wastes money and hurts your overall reach to the people who actually need your services.
Budget-Friendly Adjustments
Every small business needs to maximize its marketing dollars, and analytics gives you the data you need to do this. When you know this data, you can make cost-effective changes and adjustments to your marketing campaigns. You also avoid marketing waste because the decisions you make and implement are based on data.
Analytics lets you keep an agile budget. When something stops working, you can either spend time and money to optimize it based on data, or you can let it taper off and put your efforts into a campaign that is working. Understanding customer behavior through analytics, and then adjusting as a result, is the key to making cost-effective marketing decisions.
Localize Your Online Marketing More Effectively with Surefire Local
Localizing your online marketing starts with data, and data comes through analytics. When you have this data and use it well, you won’t waste as many marketing dollars while better reaching your target audience down to specific zip codes. These local marketing strategies also improve your customer engagement and, ultimately, fuel effective business growth.
Yet if analytics are the key, how can you access those? Analytics tools give you these insights. Google Analytics is one of the most popular to use, giving insight into search engine results and website traffic. It is a trusted platform that gives a huge number of data points you can track, and all for free.
You can also invest in a popular SEO tool, such as Semrush, WooRank, or Ahrefs, for additional insights. Through these tools, you can analyze your competitors, perform keyword research, and target your on-page SEO more effectively. These tools add additional information beyond what Google provides, but they do have an additional cost.
Surefire Local combines the analytics from your search results with your other online marketing campaigns, including email and social media marketing, into one transparent analytics dashboard that you can easily follow and make decisions from.
No matter which tool you choose, make sure it is user-friendly. The interfaces should be intuitive so you can quickly find what you need without a huge learning curve. Being user-friendly means you can teach other people within your business how to use the platform quickly, so everyone can be on the same page about your marketing. Also, choose one that fits your business goals and budget.
How Surefire Local Helps Small Businesses with Localized Online Marketing
While there are many SEO and local marketing tools out there, few are designed specifically for small business marketing. Surefire Local is. We want to help small businesses establish and monitor a local online presence through local signals. Our goal is to make it easier for your local customers to find them while you can more efficiently monitor and optimize your campaigns. We’ve designed an all-in-one platform that lets you do all of this from one location.
Your local business can benefit from Surefire Local’s localization tools. Attend a demo to learn more about how it works.