The owners of small local businesses often have limited budgets for advertising campaigns or other means of attracting clients, so they need the most effective tools to reach their targets. No matter if they run a shop, a restaurant or a real estate agency, they will need firstly to make their business known and then to attract an important number of clients who will make their revenues grow bigger month after month.



One of the modern and efficient ways to get more clients and increase the revenues for your business is the online marketing that offers major opportunities for developing a local business, especially if it is an online business, such as E-commerce or an online shop. Even if you already have a traditional business, such as a restaurant or shop, where your clients can come and buy your products, you can also rely on online marketing in order to attract more persons interested in our business. So you will need a website for your business and a team of experienced specialists who will make a marketing strategy according to your business’ needs.



The major steps to follow in order to promote your local business are:



1. Build a website for your business. There are a lot of templates for websites on the internet and all you have to do is to choose the best for your needs – think of your present business and how you estimate it will develop in the next months, if you intend to sell products online or you need just a website for presenting your brand etc. If you don’t know anything about how to choose a template or build a website, you can hire a specialist who will take the right decisions based on your recommendations. The specialist can make different changes to the initial template in order to adapt it to your business and he will take care of buying a domain, hosting services etc.



2. Make a strategy for promoting online your business. After you have your website ready for doing business, you need to focus on the strategy for advertising your business and increasing the number of clients. For the beginning, you may need to buy advertising banners or to invest in an AdWords campaign in order to see the first results until your online presence will be strong enough to bring you more clients and increase your revenues.



3. Write content for your website. Maybe you heard the expression “Content is the king”, so you will need quality content for your website. The descriptions of your products or a few words about your activity are not enough for a website to rank high in SERP (search engine results page), your website needs articles about things that may interest your clients, for example an article about the benefits brought by your products and how these could change the customer’s life.



4. Social media profiles. Maybe you have heard of Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and you are not familiar with Google Plus, Pinterest or SlideShare. In order to make your business known, you need to make social media profiles and to be active on them. This means you have to post your best content and do this often, to engage

with your audience, to answer at your customers’ questions and complains and to keep them interested in your business.



5. Link building. A website can’t rank high in SERP without a link building strategy – this means you need to have as many external links as you can get naturally. Google will penalize you if you will buy links or get them in an inadequate manner. This is an important step, so it is recommended that your link building campaign to be handled by an experienced SEO specialist.



6. Special attention for the details of your local business – your address, e-mail and a local phone number that must appear on your Contact page. You should create a Google Plus Local page and verify your address, post a map on your website showing the position of your business.



Search engine optimization (SEO) is not a caprice nowadays since there are a lot of websites that benefit from complete SEO services handled by specialists who obtain very good results. They manage to obtain very good positions in SERP and to bring more clients for the websites’ owners who enjoy increased revenues.



There are even more steps to follow in order to promote a local business, such as verifying your business listing in Google plus in order for your business to appear in Google Maps, obtainig local citations (when something related to your business appears on the web), submitting your website and your business to local directories, obtaining reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers etc.



If you are interested in finding out more about how you can attract more clients for your local business, you may contact our specialists in online marketing who will offer you a FREE initial analysis and conception of strategy.

Updated on Tuesday 04th June 2019