6 Ways to Successfully Attract Clients Through Hyperlocal SEO
Grab your Google My Business profile, build localized landing pages, and track at the regional level
Google is now showing more and more signs of becoming hyperlocal. Barry Schwartz reported that there’s a massive compression in the number of pages for Google Maps results that suppose reducing the results to a particular geographic area. Google definitively wants to push customers toward personalized results based on their exact location.
Hyperlocal marketing has been growing in business impact and potential over the last years. This growth has directly connected with the prevalence of mobile over the desktop market and the adoption of voice assistant-enabled smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Echo.
Hyperlocal marketing is one of the most natural modes for businesses to run on. It helps you tap into your local brands’ strengths, like the option to create stable connections with consumers, while getting on the location-based advertising bandwagon. With Google hyperlocalizing its search functions, your business can keep ahead of the competition and win out.
The Basics of Hyperlocal Marketing
Hyperlocal marketing is one of the best ways to target potential customers in a highly specific geographic area. It is often used to target customers entering near-me searches on their mobiles. You know that 46% of searches have location intent. Many businesses use targeted and localized marketing because it’s less overwhelming and much easier to implement their marketing efforts.
For instance, let’s say you’re looking for a place or a shop to buy flowers near your location. How to do that? You can just use your mobile phone, visit Google, and enter a near-me search for flower shops near you. Once you find the right place, you can check for a parking space or you can walk out there. Local businesses with online and offline presences are in a great position to benefit from hyperlocal marketing.
You know that 72% of people believe in local reviews as much as in-person recommendations. And 92 % of customers aged from 18 to 34 years have a higher potential to follow local businesses on social media.
“Hyperlocal marketing gives your customers a good chance to reach highly relevant audience such that fosters proximity and credibility,” says Marc Robles from Mirman, Markovits & Landau, P.C. “It showcases the brand as the industry’s local expert to deliver a relevant marketing message.”
If you are ready to integrate hyperlocal marketing into your marketing activities, you can try out the following six powerful ways to quickly increase conversions and sales.
1. Optimize Your Google My Business Page
One of the most effective ways to maximize your local visibility is to optimize your Google My Business Page. It includes a lot of essential details that show up individual businesses in Maps results, such as an address, working hours, phone numbers and popular times.
Your Google profile will help your business improve the chances to appear on the local three-pack. To increase your online reputation, try to encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews about your product or service. If your website offers third-party services such as reservations, consultations, or menu listings, this information can also appear on your GMB listing.
When optimizing your Google My Business page, it’s important to take into account the following factors that affect local rankings:
- Distance — Google wants to know how far your business is located from the local search query. To that end, you should create landing pages for each location you manage and link back to their profiles on the web and Google My Business.
- Prominence — Here you should focus on the details like high-quality links, images, reviews, citations, and articles you have on your business.
- Relevance — Find target keywords that exactly match a search query, select the right business category, and add detailed information about your company.
2. Optimize for Voice Search
As you know, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-oriented. People are using their mobile devices more and more to do voice commands rather than type them. They want to know different information about local businesses, their deals, sales, and promos, and they want to find an instant business location. To start targeting for voice search gains, you can try out the following tips:
- Brainstorm a list of questions related to your target keywords. Use SE Ranking Keyword Suggestion Tool to find long-tail keyword variations and questions.
- Once you gather long-tail search queries, you can create content that helps people solve their problems. It should include voice trends like near me, close by, and nearby.
- Add structured data markup to your voice optimized pages. It can help Google feature elements of your content in local search results.
- Optimize your website for mobile devices: Create mobile-friendly content, reduce page loading time, use AMP, build responsive design, ensure accessibility, and provide content targeting mobile behavior.
- Create actions on the Google App and build custom skills in Alexa.
- Optimize your content for Google Answers and Rich results.
3. Create Localized Content
If you want to catch the interest of people in your location, you should create as much locally relevant content as you’d like to succeed with hyperlocal marketing. It’s crucial not to speculate but to provide actual statistics and data. That will help you know your audience better and create your offerings based on their needs and tastes.
The best way to create content for different locations is to find a local partner or local talent who understands topic-related issues in the area, traditions, customs, and local tastes. Try to express your local voice behind your articles, videos, graphics, and social media posts as that lets you build long-term relationships and increase customer trust.
When writing localized content, make sure to optimize for location-based keywords if you want to rank higher in local search results. You can also dish out a lot of local content about local events, destinations, landmarks, laws or traditions. For example, Lorenz & Lorenz, L.L.P develops and publishes content for its website that focuses on different law cases, new laws, and legal events in Austin.
4. Build Individual Landing Pages for Each Location
For successful hyperlocal marketing, it’s essential to create separate landing pages for each location of your business. That will allow you to maximize your online visibility and rank naturally for location-based search queries.
You can create more personalized content for your consumers in a specific place and easily optimize it for each area. Try to include keywords related to your location like the name of your city, town, address, or your ZIP code. Just conduct detailed keyword research to figure out what keywords are beneficial to your business.
If you run a lot of business locations, you shouldn’t create landing pages for all of them. Try to focus on the areas you want to target first. You can just add the link on your home page under the name such as Cities We Serve or Locations. Lavent Law is a good example of creating individual landing pages for each location they serve and optimize them for search queries.
5. Track Your Progress at the Local Level
To achieve success in hyperlocal targeting, it’s important to monitor your progress within the right location. I recommend using Finteza for analyzing your audience’s behavior, traffic quality, and conversion data, including Facebook Ads and Instagram Stories. With this tool, you can closely monitor how your customers are reacting to your personalized landing page tactics and render the retargeting option that lets you track the display of optimized ads to users who have already visited the website.
The closer the data you get about your business locations, the more accurate results will be. Take advantage of the local search experience of your target audience and use this insight to increase your hyperlocal strategy.
6. Build Your Online Presence
One of the biggest sticking points to staying relevant in an online- and mobile-driven world is simply getting noticed at all. If you don’t appear on someone’s Google map or show up in local search results, customers will never know about you. Search engines pay attention to a lot of factors to give the most useful and relevant search results.
You need to put great effort into local optimization tactics and appear in local searches for the areas you are targeting. Make sure you have consistent contact information on your website, social media profiles, and other listings.
The name, phone number, and address should be verified and match across as many services as possible. The style and formatting of your NAP information should be identical to increase your local SEO. You can also make your phone number clickable on your website as it will help you get more phone calls from clients and increase sales.
Once you create content, make sure to improve your on-page SEO to attract more people to your location and website. Place location-specific keywords through the most important areas on your web pages such as titles, subtitles, URLs, image alt text, and within the post content. Using geotags and hashtags on your social media posts can connect you with your local target audience.
To succeed, you shouldn’t forget about getting high-quality links, indexing, creating local pages, and promoting social media accounts. Except for your Google My Business listing, you need to claim your local profile on other authoritative platforms like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Yellowbook, and others to display in local search results.
Getting reviews is also an important factor for hyperlocal marketing success. Take steps to receive as many good reviews as you can. You can encourage your customers to leave reviews about your business. According to this research, 63.6% of customers check online reviews on Google before visiting a business. Try to provide great customer service, and ask clients for feedback.
Bottom Line
Hyperlocal marketing plays an important role in growing your business through local search and taking a significant position in the minds of customers and search engines. Hyperlocal is an area of specialty that many local businesses are looking for to maximize their marketing outcomes and engage the demographic.
Start using these effective hyperlocal strategies for finding new customers and prospects, and take your business to the next level.
