If you own a restaurant, bar, hotel, or other establishment searching for customers looking for your type of venue within a 50-mile radius, then you know the importance of local SEO. It’s not just about optimizing Google search — it’s also about ensuring that users can find you on sites like Facebook, Yelp, and Foursquare. This post will give tips for using these platforms to market your business and lure prospective customers.
1. Google My Business
Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for restaurants, brands, artists, and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps.
By verifying and editing your business information, you can both help customers find you and tell them the story of your business. When you verify your business, you show that you’re a real, verified entity, which helps build trust between you and your customers.
To get started managing your business on Google My Business:
Visit google.com/business to sign in or create an account.
If you have multiple locations, be sure to sign in with the account that’s associated with your main location.
2. Search Engine Optimization
The first step to using social media to market and grow your business is making sure that you’re search engine optimized (SEO). For a companywith a local clientele, you don’t want to rank for generic terms like “Indian restaurant.” For example, the urban-tandoor.com Indian restaurant in Bristol may choose to optimize for Indian restaurants Clifton as a key search term.
An excellent place to start is Google My Business. Google also publishes extensive guides on optimizing your site for search engines and even offers a Sitemaps tool, which will help you create a list of the pages of your website that search engines should crawl.
Once you have a system to generate traffic, social media involvement can be one of the best ways for an eatery or bar to attract more customers from within their area.
3. Trustpilot Reviews
As a consumer, you read reviews to determine which products or businesses are worth your money. When you’re running a business, you want to ensure that your customers have positive things to say about you online.
Trustpilot is an online service that helps companies collect and manage reviews from customers who purchase from them online. Trustpilot gives businesses full control over the process: Businesses can invite their customers to review their experience and request feedback about their purchase. Plus, it’s all done through one convenient platform.
This is especially important for restaurants and bars, as these industries heavily rely on gathering customer feedback.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a great way for bars, restaurants, and other businesses to increase brand exposure and drive traffic to their location. Facebook allows your business to engage with locals on local pages. Post exclusive deals and promotions to drive local customers to your location.
Engaging with residents via a local page on Facebook shows that you are part of the local community and helps build trust with prospective customers. You may also see poor comments about your business you may not have become aware of. This social listening can be extremely powerful as you can adjust your service before the issue becomes a major problem.
5. Yelp
Another web-based review platform that is highly influential to consumers is Yelp. Yelp acts as a database of user reviews for restaurants and other businesses. However, it’s not just a database — it’s also a social media platform with active local communities. It also provides a place for businesses to connect and keep patrons updated on the latest happenings at the business.
To get started using Yelp SEO tactics to help you market your business, consider these tips:
Create a free account: Visit yelp.com, click Sign Up, and fill out the form provided by Yelp. This will allow you to create and verify your account.
6. Listing Management Tools
Often an overlooked aspect of local SEO is ensuring your company’s details are consistently listed on the online directories. Tools like SEMRush offer a listing management tool that pushes your company’s details to the leading review directories such as 2findlocal, 8coupons, ABLocal, Amazon Alexa, and many more.
7. Local Link Building
Local link building is an essential element of local SEO and is arguably the most important. You can create good content on your website and hope companies and bloggers will link back to you. Alternatively, you can write content as a guest blog to have the article published on a local site. Link building is effective. However, it can be very time-consuming if you do it yourself.
8. Schema Markup
Schema markup is another part of local SEO that few people know about. Schemas mark up the information about your company on a web page in a structured format for search engines to read. For example, this can be used to mark up your address, phone number, name, and opening hours. The benefit of using schema is that it makes your website easier for customers. In addition, it helps search engines better understand the content on your site. It’s easy to implement with plugins, such as Yoast Local SEO and WordPress SEO by Yoast.
In Conclusion
Winning at local SEO requires both SEO and marketing strategies to take advantage of a big market. The growth of local search is yielding more competition, which is why a strong local SEO strategy and continued marketing efforts are key to the success of your business.
Additionally, the marketing strategies mentioned above are effective for growing a business overall. By optimizing your business’s online listings through the SEMRush listing management tool, you will be able to take advantage of your customer base as well as attract new customers.
In addition to attracting new customers through local SEO marketing, engaging with residents via a local Facebook page will also help grow your business in other ways. It highlights that you are part of the local community, making you more trustworthy to prospective customers. It attracts new clients by posting exclusive deals and promotions on the page and it helps build trust between you and the client.
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