Get Found: 3 More Steps to Getting Found Locally

Making your business easily findable locally is no easy task. Last week, we covered some basics on how to seriously improve your findability. Since our quest for perfection is never-ending, we thought we’d provide you with the next steps to getting discovered locally.
Make your website mobile-friendly. More than ever, people are searching for things to do on the fly on their mobile phones. After they’ve located your business (which by now you’ve linked on Google Maps and MapQuest!), they’ll most likely follow through and check out your website. The last thing you want is to make potential customers impatient with some flash-heavy site that takes an eternity to load. Mobile-friendly sites have been found to lead to 75% more user engagement. We’re not mathematicians or anything, but that number seems large enough to matter.
Design your site with mobile use in mind, or if you’re on the WordPress theme, download a plugin that does an automatic reconfiguration when it senses a mobile browser. If you already have a crazy custom website, making it mobile-compatible might turn into a large project. Keep this in mind if you’re currently in the process of redesigning your site, and build-in the mobile and tablet functionality now.

Community involvement.

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No matter what technological gadgets we manage to invent next, word of mouth will always be the cornerstone of marketing. Getting involved in your local community online or off will always help spread awareness of your company. For one, you should definitely create a presence on any city-specific websites. If a local business has a customer base similar to yours, consider working together to cross-advertise. For example, if you manufacture cosmetics, arrange to have them stocked in local salons and spas, with the provision that you will also point customers their way.

Go Beyond standard SEO.

Search engines are getting smarter and catching on to copious location dropping for SEO purposes. However, there are many ways to help a search engine identify your business with a particular location. Blogging about local events has the double benefit of keeping current local customers interested with fresh content, as well linking your website more closely to your location because of the numerous local references. Additionally, using place names when naming picture files will increase your overall SEO rank for the location, but also make your images findable when people do a Google image search.
There you go. To put it plainly, which is to say, in Breakfast Club terms, following these steps will ensure that in terms of findability, your business is a little less Anthony Michael Hall and a little more Emilio Estevez. No need to thank us. We’re cool like that.
 
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