If you run a business with a physical presence or your services are centred on a single area, such as:

You have a studio

You have a salon

You do tutoring services for kids

You offer beauty services

It is absolutely essential that you are reaching a local audience with your website and marketing. It can be a nice little boost to hit social follower milestones, but you won’t have a profitable or sustainable business if you can’t reach local people consistently.

Here are three ways to improve your local reach.

1. Set up your Google My Business or Google Business Profile

If you sell services or products to customers locally to you then a Google Business Profile is an important step to ensure you’re more likely to rank highly on Google if someone searches “Yoga classes near me” for example. It’s a free tool and the good news is, it’s easy to set up.

Here’s how Google describe it:

“Turn people who find you on Google Search and Maps into new customers with a free Business Profile for your storefront or service area. Personalise your profile with photos, offers, posts, and more.”

You’ll likely have seen it before even if you haven’t noticed it, here’s an example of what it looks like:

Why is it important?

Well firstly, when someone is searching for you it immediately allows them to see key information such as opening hours, your website and contact details. Secondly it lends credibility to your business, consumers have more trust in you. You can build out “social proof” by asking customers to leave you reviews, as well as using it to highlight your top news. You can add updates to your business profile (similar to those you would do on Facebook) to keep the content fresh and relevant and remind Google that you’re active. 

If you have direct contact with customers ie you aren’t an online only business I would strongly recommend setting up this profile to improve your local reach and reputation. Here is a guide to setting it up.

2. Make sure you have location based keywords on your website

This is a very common area that small businesses struggle with. You spend lots of time talking about what you offer, and how you can help… but have you made it clear where you are? If you offer massages, it’s quite tricky to offer them to someone 200 miles away. Be realistic about the local area that you cover. 

If you do some practice searches, imagine you are a potential customer. In this test session we can see that the businesses that show up are typically those with a Google Business Profile.

When someone is searching for a service, the query can be explicit (massage in north london), or implicit (massage near me, or google will just pick up that it’s likely I want a local service).

Now you can see why it’s so important to have location based keywords in your website.

So how do you get started?

List all of the things you offer and your locations

1. Eg pregnancy yoga, vinyasa yoga, yoga for beginners

2. Muswell Hill, East Finchley, Highgate, Crouch End

Think about how people would research, there might be multiple ways of saying the same thing, or they might not know the industry term you would use, so be mindful and get in your customer’s head. And remember these can be single words but more likely phrases. 

Check the search volume

Don’t be put off if the search volume sounds low, it’s better to have a niche than to try and rank for search terms with enormous volumes where you don’t really offer the service. But obviously don’t pick something that is too small.

And don’t forget you can use blogs to improve your location based keyword frequency.

3. Take advantage of local listing opportunities

You’ll improve your domain authority if you have people linking to your site. Lots of local areas have website directories or blogs or if you offer a children’s service, something like Happity. 

Another option is to make sure you’re regularly posting on local groups. If you can find ways to offer customers value, helpful suggestions and tips, you might find people are more inclined to support you and they have more trust. Lots of groups have advertising times in the week, make the effort to vary what you’re promoting and trial different imagery or testimonials. It’s all a test and learn experience, there is no blueprint! (Annoying I know!)

Getting your local marketing strategy in place is absolutely key if you offer a location based service, it might sound obvious but it’s easy to forget when you want to shout about all the great stuff you do.

If you want to review your strategy and get more detailed advice, why not book a session with me?