Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential tool for any modern business; growing without an online presence is almost impossible with today’s digital-first customer journey. Local SEO, which focuses on attracting customers that are close geographically to you, is especially important for businesses that focus on serving their local community. While some methods of online marketing are free (albeit with a considerable investment of time and effort), some do have a financial cost. If you are gearing up to invest money in marketing your business, it’s crucial you have a means to track and monitor your efforts so you can continue to focus on what works.
Efficient monitoring of your analytics coupled with cost-effective marketing strategies can push your business to the next level.
Why Is It Important To Understand Local Consumer Behavior?
Understanding local consumer behavior is the key to business growth for several reasons. Developing new products and services costs money. By understanding the needs of your local market, you can make informed choices on where to direct your time, effort and cash. The data on what your customers want from their chiropractors will help you develop a business that meets their needs.
Knowing your customers well will also enable you to target your marketing in a way that speaks to them. If your marketing focuses on working mothers but your largest customer group is over 65, you’re missing out on business. Demographics are key here — know your area and your customers, and you can build a viable business.
Part of your local marketing efforts should also focus on your competitors. As the marketplace becomes more crowded, with increasing competition for your potential customers’ attention, understanding how to stand out becomes crucial. When looking at your local competitors, think about what they offer customers. Do they focus on a particular demographic? Do they specialize in a particular treatment? What about their payment options? What gaps are there in their offering that you could potentially step into?
How Do You Set Analytics Goals for Your Business?
Getting the most out of your local SEO efforts requires defining goals to focus on and then finding the right metric to track relevant to localization. Establishing measurable objectives will help drive your goals forward and make success much more likely.
Some examples of localization-relevant metrics include:
- Check ins: If your business has a Facebook presence, tracking which customers check in (and when) can offer valuable insight.
- Social media posts: What are your customers saying about you online? What do they love about you? What are their biggest concerns? This data can help shape your offering and elevate you above your competitors.
- Photos uploaded to Google Business Profile: Regular activity on your Google Business Profile can help with rankings.
- Number of new reviews: Tracking new customer numbers can be challenging, but monitoring new reviews can help.
Spend some time looking at what metrics best represent the goals you want to achieve and then focus on how those metrics can be measured. Make sure your goals are measurable and have
What Data Should You Measure When Looking at Local Analytics?
So, what data do you focus on to maximize your local SEO efforts? To answer that question, you need to understand what we mean when we talk about local SEO.
Local SEO focuses on optimizing a business’s online activity to focus on finding customers in your local area. In practice, this means that when a customer based locally searches for a chiropractor, your business is listed in the first few search terms.
Local SEO focuses primarily on:
- Search engine results pages (SERPs): where you rank in the listings returned from a basic search engine query.
- Map pack results: Google displays local search queries at the top of a page. This is known as the map pack or local pack.
- Google Business Profile listings: A Google Business Profile listing may appear in the knowledge panel or on Google Maps when searching for a local business. By optimizing your profile, you increase your chances of being listed first in any results returned.
- Google Maps: Any searches for businesses on Google Maps will display local businesses with a map marker. The returned search results will also show business details, reviews and contact information.
- Local directories and review sites: Examples include Yelp and FourSquare.
- Social media: Facebook (and other platforms) will return information on local businesses in their search results.
Data on the most popular local search queries will tell exactly how your customers find you. What search terms are they using? What questions are they asking that return you as an answer? Knowing this information will then inform you what actions you should take to increase your rankings in the SERPs and will help you develop content for your online presence that matches local customer preferences.
How Can You Track Local SEO Performance and Analyze Customer Engagement?
Tracking local SEO performance can be done in several ways. The data from your analytics tool can be used to monitor your local search rankings and to measure organic traffic from local searches.
Some of the most useful metrics can be found through Google Analytics. You can analyze customer engagement on localized content by looking at metrics, including page views, engagement and customer actions. These metrics will enable you to drill down into your customer interactions and understand what brought them to you.
Make sure you’re tracking customer interactions on your social media. What types of content attract the most clicks, comments, likes and shares? Again, these metrics will provide invaluable data on what your customers want from you. The type of social media platform you use is also dependent on the demographics of your customer base. Older customers tend to favor Facebook, whilst younger generations prefer Instagram or even TikiTok. This is not a hard and fast rule, so it’s best to make sure you’re thoroughly analyzing your social media analytics to make sure you know where your customers like to spend their time.
You can then adjust your SEO strategies based on these analytics insights so that your marketing efforts are targeted appropriately.
Getting Value for Money: Assessing Local Advertising ROI and ROAS
If you are investing in paid advertising to bring in more traffic for your website, you should be tracking return on investment (ROI) and return on advertising spending (ROAS). While ROAS will give you the effectiveness of the advertising campaign in isolation, understanding what the ROI is will tell you if your campaign is profitable.
Using ROI and ROAS will help you make cost-effective changes to your advertising spend and allow you to continually optimize your campaigns so that your spending brings real value to your chiropractor practice.
Implementing Geotargeting Strategies
If you want to implement local SEO, you can’t ignore geotargeting strategies. Geotargeting focuses on making content for customers in your local area. Geotargeted campaigns are set up in such a way that they will only show advertisements for your business to those who are within a certain geographic distance from your business. This makes these types of campaigns excellent value for money. You can leverage your analytics for precise geotargeting, and many social media platforms have the ability to geotarget built in. This will help you maximize your reach without overspending on a broad audience who will be unable to access your chiropractor practice.
Working With Local SEO Analytics Experts To Improve Your Outcomes
Localizing your online marketing efforts is essential for businesses that rely on local traffic for customers. Your SEO analytics can help you accomplish this without wasting any of your precious marketing dollars.
Focusing on local SEO can increase your business’s visibility in specific zip codes, help you achieve better customer engagement, and grow your business if you focus on proven and effective techniques. Choosing the right analytics tools to help you is crucial. The most popular is Google Analytics. It’s free to use, and it can provide a wealth of information; however, it is not always the easiest platform to use. If you’re new to SEO analytics, it can be confusing.
Surefire Local, which integrates Google Analytics, provides a user-friendly interface that is easy to learn and use. We have been helping small businesses with their localized marketing efforts for 15 years, and we focus on helping establish an online presence so that you are easy to find by your customers.
With multiple features, such as the ability to create geo-tagged content on your website or social media and a system to help you manage your company reviews, we offer the perfect tools for small businesses looking to use local SEO to increase their bottom line. Attend a Surefire Local demo today to understand how we can help!Efficient monitoring of your analytics coupled with cost-effective marketing strategies can push your business to the next level.