Growing your local business depends on the number of ideal customers you can reach. If you’re a service-area based business, you’ll need to target local leads instead of anyone across the country. Oftentimes, local businesses make the mistake of reaching customers who don’t qualify for their services. For example, let’s say you own an HVAC company in Vienna, VA, and serve customers within a 50-mile radius. A prospect from Blacksburg, VA (255 miles away) is looking for an AC repair technician and your business appears in their Google search results. How can that happen? That prospect is way outside your 50-mile service area and does not qualify as a good lead. In this blog, I am going to delve into local reach marketing and how to make sure your small business is reaching the right leads.
Determining Local Visibility
There are several factors that determine whether or not your ideal customer will be able to find you in their search queries. Google’s recommendations and our proven recommendations are combined to help find the best match for any given search; we like to call them the 5 pillars of online visibility:
- Recency
- Relevance
- Distance
- Prominence
- Availability
Check out an in-depth explanation of the 5 pillars in our complete guide to marketing your local business on Google. If you are not focusing on these 5 local search ranking factors, your local business will miss out on your ideal customers and likely get found by unqualified prospects.
Let’s do a quick exercise. Go to Google and search for your business, your services, and your local market. What do the search results look like? What information do you see about your business? This quick test will help you identify any discrepancies in your local reach and you can identify areas of improvement.
After all, Google favors businesses in local search results that:
- Match as the most relevant results for a given search
- Provide the most detailed and accurate information
- Actively manage their online presence
Local Reach Marketing Checklist
If you can’t find your business in local search results or you see inaccurate information, here’s a checklist to increase your local reach.
Business Listings
Did you know there are 50+ sites that show your business information? The more listings you have, the more proximity signals you create for your business to increase the odds of appearing in local search queries. Maintaining those directory listings is one of the most important factors in increasing your local reach.
Need to check if your customers can find your business online? Check your visibility through our business listings tool. You’ll get:
- A snapshot view of your local online visibility
- Your website’s trust ranking, domain authority, and local SEO
- Insights into how people are finding you online (top-ranking website pages and search queries)
- The health of your business information online, with listings missing and others that might have bad information
Online Reviews
Are you regularly requesting and responding to your online reviews? The more reviews you have and the more you build towards a higher star rating, the more prominent your local business becomes in search results.
Website
Your local business should never stop optimizing its website. Getting found in local search results is directly tied to maintaining and optimizing your website. Here are a couple of tactics that will boost your local reach.
- Add structured data and local schema to your website code
- Build location-based pages onto your website
- Consistently publish relevant content to your website’s blog
Content
At Surefire Local, we like to say “Content is still King!”. Content plays a huge role in your local search rank. When you consistently publish new blogs, social posts, images, and videos, your business will more than likely appear higher in local search results.
SUGGESTED READING: Increase Your Local Ranking Checklist + Action Plan
Simplify Reaching the Right Customers
Local reach marketing can become a lot to tackle for one person. That’s why we built the Surefire Local Marketing Platform: to turn you and your marketing team into local marketing superheroes. You’re able to leverage the tools you use every day in a single, unified platform that was designed for the local marketer. See a demo of the industry’s most powerful platform and discover how you can reach local prospects without wasting more time or marketing dollars.