They say every business is a media business. And in today’s hyper-connected world, this is true for even the most humble “mom and pop” shops.
With more and more small businesses turning to digital marketing, a whole secondary industry within marketing has emerged: local digital marketing.
What is Local Digital Marketing?
Local digital marketing aims to present online ads and search results based on the location of a consumer. In big cities this can be tailored down to the neighborhood or street someone lives on. Or what stores they’ve visited that day.
What is SEO?
One of the largest aspects of local digital marketing is called local SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and is a set of practices aimed at getting your online presence to ‘rank’ highly in search results. After all, when was the last time you went several pages deep in search results?
Getting onto the first page of search results for high intent keywords can be the difference between your business thriving and your sales pipelines drying up.
Unlike traditional marketing — known as outbound marketing — SEO is known as inbound marketing. This title reflects the notion that SEO isn’t centered with sending messaging out into the world (as commonly done with advertising). Rather, inbound marketing is about creating content and branding that attracts visitors to your media presence.
Also known as content marketing, inbound marketing involves creating content that is valuable to users. When you’ve created something valuable (and marketed it accordingly), your presence is rewarded by placing in search engine results.
Differences Between SEO and Local SEO
General SEO is highly important for your business. It relies on the content you create getting a warm reception from others.
Content production takes money, or time, or both. And for many small business owners there may not be much of either to go around.
Local SEO employs a number of the tactics of SEO but with less risk. How? Local search results rely heavily online citations and reviews of your business. Both citations and review management can be successfully automated and at low cost to you.
So what are citations? Citations are primarily found in business directories such as Yelp, the Yellow Pages, and countless local options. Whenever your business changes their hours, their location, branding or other basic information, citations may not accurately reflect the state of your business. This can lead to bad reviews and messaging with potential clients. Additionally, if your citations in different directories don’t align, search engines will assume the information is incorrect and your local SEO will suffer.
Maintaining citations by hand can be quite time-consuming (and error prone). Luckily there are a number of tools that can help. Many site auditing services can provide an accurate and timely glimpse into how optimized your citations are. Many of these tools can automate the process of correcting citations as well. Imagine not having to sign in and manage 50+ citations by hand.
Tip: Look for SEO auditing tools that include citation auditing
Secondly, search engines increasingly incorporate review information into local SEO results. By ensuring you have review moderation and remediation services for bad reviews can make a huge difference in both your search result placement as well as your online image (and thus conversion rate).
While maintaining around-clock communications on review services is impractical for most businesses, a growing number of SEO platforms offer on-demand services around review management and auditing.
Tip: Look for SEO platforms that provide on-demand review management
Pulling It All Together with White Label SEO Tools
So we get that local SEO is important. And that good local SEO results rely heavily on online citations and reviews.
We’ve also covered some of the types of tools that can help to automate quality local SEO practices. But we’ll just square with you, choosing SEO tools can be overwhelming.
SEO has become increasingly nuanced and technical in recent years. For small business owners, just choosing the right tool set can be overwhelming.
Luckily, there’s some pretty great coverage of SEO tools for small businesses out there.
A recent guide I created looked at the 50 most popular SEO tools, and has two sections that are of particular interest to small business owners. Check out my guide to SEO tools for small businesses. If you’re looking to automate your local SEO, pay particular attention to the sections about white label SEO platforms and auditing tools.
