Time for an Exercise:

Open your favorite search engine and search for your brand name and your product category. In general, most well-known national brands will occupy 50%-80% of the links on the search engine results page (SERP), particularly for the branded search. Well done.

Now for the eye-opener:

Perform the same searches, but add a geographic modifier (e.g., city name) to the search query. (Note: Any potential customer who performs this type of search would most likely be further down the sales funnel and ready to buy.)

So, how did your branded and product-category searches fare this time? If you’re like many national brands, your search results were highly variable, consisting of discount sites and poorly designed reseller sites filled with competitive information and irrelevant results.

“Local Web” is the name for the integrated, growing ecosystem of online media channels that collectively drive local online marketing and are ultimately responsible for those search results.

If you’re ready to commit to improving your Local Web presence, here are few key areas you’ll have to master.

Localized Contents:

According to Google, 20% of all searches have a local intent—that’s 2.8 billion searches per month. Your brand can never truly be relevant to local markets without search-engine-optimized local websites. If you’re a franchise or have company-owned stores, that means unique URLs with company information and localized content.

Those local websites can be (and should be) fairly simple—containing key NAP (name, address, and phone number) information, products and services offered, and a clear call to action.

Mobile Optimization:

When searches originate from a mobile device, the number with local intent jumps to greater than 50%, according to Microsoft. Remember: Local customers are performing local searches, which indicate a high propensity to buy immediately. Having an optimized network of local sites, however, isn’t enough. You must ensure that those sites are not only mobile-friendly but also highly optimized for the mobile searcher.

Local Search Registries:

Initiating, claiming, and completing local search registrations for every local outlet is a critical component of performing well in the Local Web. Map based listings play an increasingly important role in search engine results, often trumping traditional SEO-based listings.

Go beyond the “biggies” of Google, Yahoo, and Bing, ensuring that your local listings are accurate across the hundreds of smaller directory sites. Doing so not only improves your visibility to searchers but also helps drive better SEO placement for your google map listings and local websites.

You can justify your investment and time in the Local Web only if you can accurately track and report the results to both the local outlets and senior management.

Analytics:

Certainly, online analytics play a crucial role in this effort and should be a key focus. However, you should also consider the role that tracking phone numbers can play in your analytics. The majority of local businesses measure the success of their marketing efforts by the frequency of telephone calls.

Mastering the five elements will give you leads from your local market and the people who are ready to make a sale for you. Click here to know more about how we deal about Local SEO with our SEO services at affordable SEO Packages.

This is a far call, but this cannot be neglected. How often do you see kids and executives flash their smart phones and tap to find the nearest attractions and services they need through their phones. Mobile marketing just like online marketing is gaining momentum to get to their customers just at the moment.

If you are a B2C business, this will prove a lot fruitful to you. No small gains for the B2B customers too. The more the visibility the more the brand value you are creating. But still let’s have a look at the pros and cons people are facing now a day.

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented reality is letting people taste a bite of the pudding before they can actually buy it. Simply put they are reality which can be hidden from normal vision but visible through a gadget, a webcam or a mobile cam for that matter.

Applications like Layar, help people find the local business and attractions just by letting them see the world through the camera in their smart phones. Tagging your business with all the local marketing tools (e.g. Google Places) comes very much handy in getting visibility in these kinds of search methods.

Local marketing is itself an art, because when we are stretching our necks to the horizon, lot of times we forget the local customers who are looking for our services and business with them. This kind of marketing has the benefit of changing the window shopper to customer and also the conversion rate is guaranteed because they were looking for some services which you offer with so many others in market place.

Oh! Is it something for people who only use smart phones and walk down the streets?

Definitely not! AR is the next best thing that is happening to the online or virtual marketing and its going viral. With thousands of people recruited just to create apps like this, you wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity. And if you are a business and you wanted to give the feel of your website to your customers and you can reach them some way other than search engine is just as cool as it can get.

Check out the video below and understand the benefits.