Local Search Marketing

Local search marketing comprises both offline and online tactics employed to promote businesses that serve customers face-to-face. The terms local search engine optimization (local SEO) and local business marketing are often used synonymously with local search marketing. The many goals of this form of promotion can include improving customer satisfaction, reputation, traffic, visibility, conversions, and revenue, with the underlying mission of engaging a greater number of nearby customers.

Local businesses are defined as commercial entities that serve customers in person. Local business models range from small, single location companies to large enterprises with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of premises. Service area businesses without physical locations also qualify as local businesses, provided they carry out their work at the locations of their customers and clients.

When fully realized, local search marketing can be envisioned as a structured hierarchy of tasks. While every campaign will have unique goals based on the priorities of the local business owner and their marketers, it’s useful to study a broad overview of local search marketing, which we present here as a pyramid. Tasks at the bottom of the pyramid should be viewed as foundational, with opportunities higher up offering exciting potential for competitive differentiation.

Here is your key to the foundations of local search marketing:

Guideline Compliance

The first step to marketing any local business is to study the rules governing the platforms on which you plan to have a presence and also to be knowledgeable of the laws regulating advertising and communications in your country. Failure to comply with policies and laws can result in punitive action on the part of platforms and litigation.

Every online platform has its own standards. For local businesses, one of the most important documents you’ll regularly reference for guidance is The Guidelines to Representing Your Business on Google. Because Google has become the dominant force in online local search, their guidelines not only outline how local brands can and can’t use Google’s platform, but they have also heavily influenced how we conceive of and talk about local businesses in the modern era. Businesses that intentionally or accidentally break or bend Google’s rules may find their local business listings removed or suspended, or their reviews filtered out or removed. Companies striving to build long-lasting brands will seldom find it worthwhile to break the rules.

Whether you are participating on local business listing platforms like Google Business Profile, community sites like Nextdoor, review platforms like Yelp, or social media hubs like Instagram, read the guidelines before engaging in any marketing activity.

Customer Service Strategy

Providing excellent customer experiences is the very foundation of local business success. Since the beginning of commerce, word-of-mouth marketing within communities has been the traditional source of business reputation. The rise of paid advertising and PR briefly gave enterprises a certain degree of control over public perception and brand narratives, but today, one of the chief seats of local business reputation resides in online reviews. A remarkable 96% of adult US consumers read local business review content. 98% of people place some degree of trust in this sentiment in determining whether or not to patronize a particular local business. These days, only 11% of consumers trust what brands say about themselves over what the public says.

Because it is now customers who write your most trusted, influential brand story, it stands to reason that there is no substitute for providing exceptional customer service. Happy customers write persuasive and lucrative reviews. With this in mind, staff hiring and training practices, employee satisfaction, and the generosity of your customer guarantees are key ingredients to local business longevity. All staff should be fully trained in products, services, complaint resolution, and policies. All leadership should role model the values that the brand wants every customer to experience when they walk in the door.

Market Intelligence

The shortest road to local business success is to find out what community members want and then to give it to them. Local businesses must engage in three types of market research:

1. Surveying their community to find out what local people need and want

2. Surveying the local competition to find unique and desirable niches the business can fill

3. Surveying how Google is handling search results in the geographic area of the business

For an in-depth tutorial on this type of analysis, read Assessing Demand & Analyzing Markets in Moz’s Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide. In brief, local businesses can poll consumers to refine their offerings. They can audit the successful practices of their nearby competitors to identify gaps and areas in which their business can do better than a competitor. And, they can search Google for all of the terms for which the business wants to rank to understand which tactics need to be employed to achieve maximum visibility for nearby customers in the local and organic search engine results.

The outcomes of this work should include a unique sales proposition (USP) that differentiates the brand from others and an SEO and marketing strategy that improves or widens the online visibility of the business so that it becomes easier to find and choose. Gaining market intelligence is an ongoing task that serves to keep local brands competitive across many years in business.

Reputation Strategy

We’ve briefly touched on reviews in our section on Customer Service Strategy, but there is much more to know. Because local business reviews now play so large a role in public perception of companies, it’s vital to know that:

• 6 in 10 consumers require businesses to have 4+ star overall rating to consider giving them a try
• 39% of consumers filter reviews to see what’s most recent first, and another 24% filter to see negative sentiment first
• 70% of customers read between 5-20 reviews before deciding whether to patronize a business
• Only 14% of survey respondents say they never write reviews, yet 39% of customers have not been directly asked for a review by a business in the past 5 years.
• Multiple aspects reviews are local search ranking factors

Data Source: The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report - Moz

A reputation strategy is founded on excellent customer service, but then it branches off into two related directions: review management and review acquisition.

Local businesses must actively monitor incoming reviews and respond to each of them as quickly as possible. 60% of review writers expect your response within two-or-less days. Owners should offer thanks for positive reviews and bring their best problem-solving skills to negative reviews in order to regain and retain customers and safeguard reputation. Use of software like Moz Local can lift the burden of knowing when new reviews come in so that each customer receives a swift and appropriate response from the business owner. Tools like this are especially useful to multi-location businesses that receive lots of reviews, but single location businesses can’t afford to ignore this vital sentiment either.

Meanwhile, local businesses should create a review acquisition campaign that runs for the life of the business. When directly asked, more than half of your customers will always or usually write a review, and the top reason people don’t write more reviews is because they forget to when they have free time. Email and mobile phone number collection at the time of service ensures that customers can be contacted soon after with a review request, and in-store, store-front, and print materials can feature reminders of how much the company would appreciate a review. Emails, texts, and other assets should feature links to your review profiles and directions for how to leave a review.

Finally, reviews are not the only seat of reputation. 67% of people still rely on the recommendations of family and friends, 55% consult social media, and 42% go to the company’s website in search of first-party reviews you should be publishing there. There are no shortcuts to earning a glowing reputation – it’s an asset the local business must build up and safeguard with great customer service and smart strategy, year after year.

Location Data Distribution Strategy

Your location data consists of the name, address, phone number, website URL, hours of operation and other key pieces of information that customers need to know to discover, choose, and connect with your business. Local business listing platforms exist to gather and promote this content, and each local business should have a strategy for getting listed on high quality sites and apps.

A business can choose to do all this work manually, hire a company to do it for them, or invest in software to make light work of ongoing management of the accuracy and richness of the data on these platforms. For example, Moz Local distributes data to sources like these:

Search Engines

• Google
• Bing
• Apple

Primary Data Aggregators

• Foursquare
• Data Axle (formerly Infogroup)
• Neustar Localeze

Major Directories and Important Platforms

• Yelp
• Facebook
• Instagram
• YP
• Superpages
• DexKnows
• BrownBook
• Judy’s Book
• Waze
• Uber
• Nextdoor
• ezLocal
• CitySquares
• Cylex
• Hotfrog
• USInfo
• ShowMe Local
• TomTom
• Here
• Opendi
• Yalwa
• iGlobal
• Manta
• Tupalo
• US City
• N49
• Pages24
• Find Open
• Whereto
• Navmii

Listings on such platforms must be created and maintained for ongoing accuracy so that customers are always encountering correct information on the web. 52% of review writers say they’ve written negative reviews after being inconvenienced by incorrect local business information online. Any time a business changes its hours of operation, moves to a new address, changes phone numbers or experiences other alterations, each listing should be updated, and this is why software is such a welcome tool, turning what could be hours of work into just a minute spent in an organized dashboard that controls all key listings. Check the health of your listings for free now.

Local business listings are also known as structured citations, and they are considered a local search ranking factor. Your Google Business Profiles, in particular, are incredibly powerful marketing assets, enabling the business to upload products, photos, menus, services, and videos, and to write ongoing updates, announce events, direct message with customers, ask and answer questions, and to manage the two-way conversation of reviews. Competitive local businesses should invest in making the most of the features offered by each platform in order to provide everything customers could want to know about the company to choose it for a transaction.

Website Authority, Quality and Optimization

While local listings are major assets in getting found and chosen, websites remain the home base of local businesses. They are the one area of the web your company fully controls, and to realize their full potential for driving traffic and sales to the business, as well as for contributing to the rankings of your Google Business Profiles, the website must demonstrate authority, be of high quality, and be properly optimized for local searchers.

Local business owners should pay careful attention to Google’s ongoing updates that relate to websites. In particular, the E-E-A-T framework outlines what Google tells its Quality Raters to look for in evaluating the quality of website pages, as shown in this screenshot:

Regardless of your business category, local business owners need to seek to build up a reputation for being an authority with experience and expertise in their field, and websites must be truthful, usable, and secure. Website should be mobile-friendly, render properly across all browsers, and be free from technical errors and problems like malware.

Meanwhile, search engine optimization seeks to ensure that website content can be understood by both humans and search engines. The central task of this work is researching:

• The words customers use to search for what you offer – you can use keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer, as well as surveying your customers and auditing conversations like phone calls and texts to understand how your community speaks about your business, your goods, and your services.

• What intent search engines like Google associate with each search phrase – you should search using the language your customers do and discover what types of content are currently ranking for these terms. For example, is Google featuring lengthy articles for the top results, or local packs, or images, or videos?

The results of research like this should then be reflected in what the business publishes on the website, with the tandem goals of helping customers and signaling relevance to search engines.

To understand the fine details of optimizing website pages for local search, read this chapter of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide that covers on-page local SEO. To understand more about how search engines work, read The Beginner’s Guide to SEO. In brief, competitive local businesses must seek to publish a website that showcases the reputation of the business owner in a way that meets with the approval of search engines while also ensuring that the website is the core business asset being employed to assist customers on their journeys towards a transaction. Never forget that this is the most important digital space your business directly controls (unlike local business listings, reviews, or social profiles). Make the most of this space!

Publishing Strategy

The moment a local business steps online, it becomes a publisher, just like a print magazine or newspaper. As briefly mentioned above, local business content should be based on researching how customers search for what the business offers and how Google handles their results for these phrases.

The amount of publishing a local business has to do will depend on its competitive environment and its goals. For example, if you are running the only bakery in a small, rural town, your publication strategy may only need to be quite modest to earn you the number of customers you require to be profitable. But, if you are running one of thousands of restaurants in a large city, you’ll likely need to invest more in your content strategy to stand out from the crowd. All of the following are forms of content that could play a part in your publishing strategy and that require careful, thoughtful research and planning to be effective:

• Textual website-based content in the form of pages, articles, blog posts, first-party reviews and other user-generated content, guides, interviews, white papers, policies, credentials, reports, tutorials, navigational menus, calls-to-action, FAQs, wizards, transcriptions, button text, link and link anchor text, forms, tooltips, driving and walking directions, location information, and more.

• Textual offsite content including local business listings, reviews, interviews, guest articles, columns, social media posts, interviews, and features of yourself, your staff and your business on third-party sites.

• Image and video content including photos and recordings of your premises, goods, and services, staff, and audio content such as podcasts and playlists. Video can also be a form of customer telesupport.

• Other assets including maps, tools, widgets, games, contests, apps, and carts,

Everything a local business puts out there on the web is a form of publishing that represents the company. Even a few words, like those on a button, matter. The best content helps customers along their journey while also demonstrating to search engines that it deserves to be ranked well when the intent of a searcher matches what the business is providing.

Competitive Edge

During the Market Intelligence phase of your own journey, you analyzed what local customers want, how competitors operate, and how Google handles the searches for which you wish to become highly visible. Once you have the foundations of your business (like your website, listings, and publishing strategy) well underway, it’s time to revisit and rerun your research to keep discovering how your business can stand out on the local scene.

For example, a competitor may have a great website but have earned few reviews, meaning investing more in review acquisition could give you an edge. Or, a competitor might have great textual content on their website, but you discover that your community is getting excited by short videos on Tiktok – by creating them, you could differentiate your brand. Market research could turn up that your customers are very eager to support sustainable businesses but are finding few local options – by greening your business and promoting what you are doing, you could win customers away from other nearby companies that aren’t making the effort and engage a whole new audience which others are overlooking. Market research should be an ongoing task for any business seeking to grow.

Just remember, everything you do starts with the customer. By learning to serve them well both offline and online, and keeping one eye on how search engines are changing and growing, you’ll be well on your way to forming a successful local search marketing strategy.

Whether you are studying local search marketing and local SEO to promote your own business or to become skilled at promoting other brands, it’s important to begin the work with the understanding that this is a field which requires ongoing education. Search engines continuously update how they handle digital media and trends in online user behavior change constantly. What works at the beginning of a fiscal year may become outdated by December.

Because of this, it’s realistic to approach local search marketing as you would your favorite hobby – it’s something you’re willing to take the time to get better at, because you feel a genuine eagerness to remain engaged with the task. Learning the fundamentals of local SEO doesn’t require much time. Spend a couple of hours reading through a resource like The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide and you’ll have made a good start in understanding the big picture of this form of marketing. From there, consider taking formal training, like Moz’s video-based Local SEO Certification course. Keep pace with industry developments by following leading local SEOs on social platforms so that you know about new opportunities as soon as they arise.

The more time you can devote to learning, the more seasoned you will become in this work, learning not just what to do, but also, what not to do in marketing local brands. Every new skill you acquire is an asset to the local businesses you’re promoting. The time you spend should be measured by your sincere desire to succeed.

• In Real Life: Local SEO Tactics - In this course, local business owners learn how to get the most out of their SEO strategy using skills and knowledge they already have.
• Check out this Whiteboard Friday by Greg Gifford on Easy to Implement Tactics for Local Link Building!
• What is a Local Citation?
• 4 Step Guide to Local SEO - In this quick video series, Moz Customer Success experts walk through important local marketing best practices and how to put them into action using Moz Local.
• The Ultimate Guide to Local Search Ranking Factors
• The Core Components of Local Listings
• Why Duplicate Listings Matter
• Local SEO Cheat Sheet [Free PDF Download] - Keep on top of your local SEO tasks with our free downloadable cheat sheet.
• The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide - A comprehensive beginner's guide to SEO marketing for small businesses.
• Local SEO Certification - In this six-part Certification, you’ll receive nearly six hours of on-demand, instructor-led content, covering the fundamentals, local competitor research, location data management, reputation management, and measuring and tracking success.
• The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report - Our local business review survey outlines key takeaways regarding the impact of reviews on consumer behavior and local business success. Learn more about the fundamentally important inclusion of online local business reviews in any local SEO strategy.