Increased visibility for local service businesses is a necessary investment. As a local services company, you can no longer rely on word of mouth to meet your business needs on an ongoing basis. You need to be present and easily found online. The importance of online visibility for local service businesses cannot be understated.
When you have greater visibility online, your local business – from home service provider to legal professional – attracts more leads or people who need your services. The easier it is for potential customers to find you, the more likely they are to reach out to you.
Growing your business means constantly having access to new customers and leads, but that doesn’t always mean just creating a new marketing campaign. It includes making sure people who need your services can easily find your business if it is close to them. How do you do that? Let’s take a closer look at the elements that play a role in this process.
Understanding the Importance of Online Visibility
As a business, you provide a valuable service to your customers, and they come back to you whenever they need to. However, to attract them to you for the first time, your company has to be easily found. Increased visibility for local service businesses offers several key benefits:
Competitive Advantage
If you’re visible online, and your competition is not, more of the leads come to you naturally. Because consumers use the internet to find the businesses and services they need, if you are not listed in Google Search Results, chances are good your competitors are.
Customer Behavior
When you need to visit a chiropractor, how do you find a professional? If you need to turn to a plumber or a painter for a project, you will likely go online to search for an available provider that matches the specific needs you have. Potential customers for your business do the same thing.
Local Search Trends
By understanding what people locally you are looking for, you can better tailor their ability to find you. Using terms, descriptions, location names, and other factors that help to demonstrate where your business is locally to the consumer helps Google (and your customer) make the decision to choose your services over others.
Effective Strategies to Increase Online Visibility
The importance of online visibility is clear, but how do you actually pull people onto your site and capture those leads? Implement these strategies to bring in the traffic you need:
1. Optimize Your Website for Local SEO
Optimization of your website means attracting people close to your physical location. There are several ways to do so:
- Local keywords: Use location-based keywords throughout your website that clearly indicate where you are located. Use terms that locals know and understand.
- On-page SEO: Utilize local words and terms on your website, including in meta tags, headers, and content. Make sure what you put on your site, such as weather information or services offered, is relevant to your customer base.
- Mobile optimization: Mobile-friendly websites are critical to ranking in search engines. Most of today’s consumers use smartphones to find the services they need. If your website is too hard to use online, they will go to the next one.
2. Leverage Your Google Business Profile
As one of the best free tools to increase visibility for local service businesses, a Google Business Profile is a must.
- Complete the profile: Fill it out fully, incorporating your business’s hours, website, physical address, and contact information. That helps Google to solidify your actual location.
- Encourage reviews: Ask your current customers to leave a review on your profile. That will help others who find you learn what you can do for them.
- Post regular updates: Use your profile to keep your customers and community up to date on the services you offer and the promotions you are running.
3. Utilize Local Listing and Directories
Local directories and listings are online locations where you can list your company’s information so those looking for it can find it. These repositories of information often rank high in search engines—and again, if you are not there, your competitor is.
- Claim your listings: Learn about all of the listing directories available for your industry. This may include Angie’s List, Yelp, and others specific to the services you offer.
- Consistency is key: Ensure every detail across all of your listings is exactly the same. This helps the search engines link them together.
- Engage with listings: Ensure that the information in your listing is up-to-date and accurate. You should certainly provide new information, drop in keywords, and use local terms as needed. Also, make sure to respond to any inquiries you receive.
4. Create Localized Content
The content you place on your website needs to be as focused as possible on your local community. There are various ways to achieve this.
- Create local blog posts: Incorporate local events, information, references, and details that those in your service area would recognize and understand.
- Community involvement: Share information about the local events and charities you are supporting within the community.
- Local case studies: You can also use local success stories and testimonials on your website to show what you are doing for the community. This helps create a bond between customers and your business.
5. Optimize Social Media for Local Engagement
Many of the people who need your services are using social media. They ask questions about how to get work done or provide insight into the goods and services they receive on social media. Use this to your advantage:
- Local hashtags: When you share posts and updates on social media, incorporate location-specific hashtags to increase your post visibility.
- Engage with the local community: Talk to local businesses and community groups online. Follow their pages, interact with their posts, and join local groups.
- Promote local offers: Make sure your social media promotional efforts target a local geo area. This reaches out to the customers most likely to patronize you.
6. Invest in Local Online Advertising
Local paid advertising is still a very important component of building your leads. There are several specific ways to do so:
- Google Ads: One of the most robust and effective options for most service businesses is to use Google Ads. These display throughout the internet whenever someone is looking for the types of services you offer.
- Social media ads: Run paid ads on social media sites where you know your customers are. That tends to be Facebook and Instagram. If your business is targeted towards other businesses, LinkedIn may be a valuable spot.
- Retargeting: Utilizing retargeting strategies to re-engage visitors to your website after they have visited once. That helps bring them back to your site.
Measuring and Analyzing Your Visibility Efforts
Once you have a plan in place to build your business’s online visibility, it’s time to find out how well it is doing. This can be done when you measure and analyze what works best to reach your customer base. To do that, consider these strategies:
- Analytics tools: Track your website traffic, local search rankings, and social media engagement. When you see an uptick here, you know your efforts are working.
- Assess the ROI of every investment you make: That includes each investment of time, money, and resources into each of these previously mentioned strategies. Focus on those that offer the best online visibility strategies for your money.
- Adjust strategies over time: Use data to help you refine and improve your tactics, stretching your ROI even further as you do.
Building Visibility Online for Your Service Business
As a business owner, you need to focus on strategies that increase your visibility online so that people who are looking for your services can easily find them. To do that, work to build out your presence online with an SEO-optimized website, local SEO keyword selection, and local directories and listings. Claim your Google Business Profile, build localized content, and then put in place strategies to measure your social media engagement. It’s a lot of work, but by taking these steps, you make it easier for your business to get the local leads you need.
Implement these strategies to enhance your local presence, drive more leads to your business, and ensure your marketing campaigns achieve each one of your goals. You can start applying these strategies to your efforts now. Work to develop one strategy after another to create a cohesive plan for achieving results. You’ll need to tweak it over time and work to keep it relevant, but that’s going to keep building leads into your business.
Then, measure those results. What is working best for your business? Is one method more effective or cost-effective than another? You’ll know if you are using tools to analyze and monitor your customers’ engagement with your business. If you want to see how easy this can be, attend a Surefire Local demo to find out what goes into managing your online visibility.