5 Tips For Maximizing Localized Social Signals To Influence Buying Behavior
For small businesses, local search is everything. In fact, a geo-centric search engine marketing effort can prove more effective than an organic results-oriented campaign. This is largely because it’s difficult to divorce local SEO from social signals. Why? Local search is social. Users scour social review sites like Yelp.com and Google Places for a company’s clout in the local community. This is great news for small businesses everywhere. Using geo-marketing to boost social signals doesn’t require a massive marketing budget, and can be implemented fairly easily for both brick and mortar and service-based companies alike.
Five Tips For Leveraging Localized Social Signals
1) Leveraging Local Reviews
Local small businesses couldn’t ask for a promotional tool better than local reviews. Encourage both online customers both online and in-person to write reviews on Google Places and Yelp.com. It’s OK to encourage good reviews from satisfied customers, but businesses know that that’s completely out of their hands. If a business is around for along enough, it’s almost a guarantee that they’ll get a bad review. But as long the good reviews are prominent, bad reviews will have little, if any, influence on social perception.
2) Going Mobile
Today’s business patrons are getting more and more mobile-savvy. When they want to know about a business or service, they pull out their smartphone and go to work doing research on local businesses. Every business needs to be accessible to mobile users. Social profiles, web pages and business information need to be organized in a way that is easily accessible for smartphone users.
3) Geo-fy Your Links
Web content in all its forms should be re-imagined for a hyper-local audience. This means changing keywords and phrases so they are geo-specific and easily recognizable by the locals.
4) Post Social Info in Physical Location
Smart brick and mortar businesses know that their patrons are highly active on social media sites. Small businesses with physical locations should put together attractive displays detailing social profile information throughout the store, office, hair salon, etc. This makes it easy for customers to find a company online.
5) Check-In Discounts
Brick and mortars can also implement discounts to customers who check-in with social applications like, FourSquare, Yelp and Facebook. For those companies with no physical location, QR codes tend to achieve the same objective.
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