How To Excel In Hyperlocal Marketing
Chad Faith
Director of Content
Hyperlocal marketing is a time-tested way to grow your business and engage with your customers, i.e., marketing to a defined local geographic area. The area that you are marketing to is typically small. For example, it could be a certain zip code, a neighborhood, a city, a region, or even a block.
This form of marketing has existed ever since humans started doing business, but has been trending in recent years (more businesses are going hyperlocal with their SEO campaigns). These days, it is an undeniable fact that hyperlocal marketing is an essential to have in any traditional or modern company’s marketing mix.
If you want to learn how to excel in hyperlocal marketing, here are some tips to ensure your success:
Monitor Local Search Engine Results
During the process of content optimization for hyperlocal targeting, you should remember to track the progress within the target location, i.e., tracking SERPs that are serving your particular area. Avoid monitoring ranks and clicks on a national scale. Let’s say, your own a cafe business. So, you wouldn’t want to track clicks and ranks for something like cafes near me on a national level, when you actually wanted to rank for the keyword in the Saint Paul, Minnesota area.
When you start tracking keyword rankings at your location of choice, you can gather accurate information that provides quality insight into your target audience’s local search experience. This is what you need to guide your strategy and avoid online marketing pitfalls as you move forward.
Create Local Landing Pages for Each Location
Local landing pages can help maximize your appearance in search. You will be able to optimize your content for each location you are targeting and make them more personalized for potential clients in that specific area. To find out which keywords are relevant to your location, you need to perform keyword research. In most cases, keywords could be things such as your ZIP code, the name of your city, and more. So, optimize, optimize, and optimize your local landing pages with the right keywords! It’s one of the best ways to attract more traffic.
Always Get the Basics Right Before Taking the Leap of Faith
If you want to increase the success rate of your online marketing strategy, you should prepare and optimize your Google My Business page. Leave no blanks empty and make sure you upload high quality and eye-catching pictures. You will also need to verify that your businesses are listed in all the right categories within Google.
All Google My Business page elements provide important signals that help out with audience targeting and hyperlocal ranking, and that’s why your Google profile matters so much. It affects your business’s appearance on the Local 3-Pack. You may also want to consider featuring reviews of past satisfied customers to enhance your business’s reputation.
Include Relevant Structured Data Markups on Content Pages
You can incorporate schema markup to provide Google lots of information about your business. By using structured data markup on your website pages, you can define an array of business attributes, including contact information, latitude and longitude, business address, operating hours, your business type, and more.
Yes, Google can crawl through your content to learn what they need about your business. However, it is better to remove the guesswork that comes with that process. These days, you should leverage structured data markup to make it clear to major search engines exactly what information you are presenting on your website. This way, your businesses have more chances of appearing for relevant queries and even filtered results; when an individual searches for businesses that operate within a certain time frame.