Businesses have been working with a vision to expand on a large scale. There are a lot of businesses that have plans of archiving 100 but fail at 1. Or reaches till 50 and decline their growth rate. Out of all these things, local business is the new trend that has huge potential to grow more than where they are standing currently. This article is for all such business owners on how to work on local business growth.
A complete digital strategy is explained in this blog on local business growth in 2023. Read till the end and implement this points in your local business.
Table of Contents
Top 5 Digital strategies to follow for local business growth in 2023.
You need strategies to grow our business. When I talk about digital strategies then taking your business online is important.
So, let us first get an overview of the different strategies that we implement to grow our local business.
- List your business on google my business and ask your customers to review your business.
- Make a website for your business and rank for local keywords.
- Run display ads about your business in the local area. (Radius of 10-15km).
- Use Instagram search for finding the local influencers for business promotion.
- Use the power of apps to build mobile push notification in the local area.
Now these points must be confusing you a lot. So, I am going to pick them up one by one and explain in detail.
1. Use Google My Business Listing
This is the most important thing to follow if you want to grow your local business. All you need to do is, go and sign up for listing your business on google map. Let me explain you step by step process.
You can also visit google support page to understand the same thing. So let’s see the steps here
- Visit google my business page.
- Create an account with your email account.
- Add your business details.
- Add all relevant images.
- Optimize your account with your business hours and content.
- Do add your business website address.
- After your details are filled, submit it to google.
- Google will send you a postcard at your business registered address.
- Use the OTP in the postcard on your google my business account to confirm your business headquarters on google maps.
- Now your business will be shown in and around your local region over the google map.
Advantage of listing business on google my business.
There is a lot of a good chance of getting business visibility in the local area if your listing gets approved over here.
- You can appear on google search results if people search for something around your business. For example,
So this makes it easy to get potential customers from your local area.
Tip: Add your business keywords that people generally search on google as your google my business name. This will help you rank better. You can learn more about how to optimize your Google my business listing to get ranked higher and local business growth.
2. Rank your website for local keyword
If you want local business growth and not looking to expand nationally or internationally then you can take advantage of building a new website and rank it for local searches.
Ranking website on google searches for local keywords is not difficult. It can be archived from little is average hard work. But it also depends if your local area is competitive or not. Mostly it’s not that competitive as only a few businesses try growing online in their local area.
How to rank website for local searches?
For ranking a website in local area, you need to keep following pointers in mind
- Optimize the local keywords into your website content, header, and other areas.
- Also, you need to take care of your website server location and IP address. This is not a compulsion but a good strength to add to your local business growth.
- Add your website location to your website schema.
- Use the website’s domain TLDs according to your country’s TLD, for example, if I want to grow my business in India only then my website should have a .in TLD in the domain. Learn how to choose a domain name for your business.
Let us understand the local business growth using the website, step by step.
- Purchase a domain name for your business.
- Build your website.
- Research all keywords that are related to local keywords. For example, if I want to rank my website in New Delhi for digital marketing service then I will set my homepage title, metadata, and content on-page optimization with keyword like “Digital marketing service in New Delhi”.
- Now design dedicated pages for different keywords for local searches and rank them using On-page SEO and Off-page SEO methods.
- Add website schema codes with the local business snippets. You can use the Google data testing tool to test your schema.
This will help you get targeted traffic and your conversions in local business growth will see good changes.
3. Run Paid Advertising in Your local area.
This method needs digital expert intervention as you need to know how to execute ads that bring conversions for you.
For running paid ads in your local area, there are two best advertising platform to do so.
- Facebook/instagram
- Google ads.
These two platforms allows you to target your local region people. These targetting can be done based on
- Any fixed diameter of area, with you as the center of the location. Let’s say you can show your business ads to people in a circle around you with a diameter of 10-15km.
- You can directly target based on longitude and latitude on google ads.
- You can also select any particular pin code to target people in that region.
With such smart option, you can promote your business service offereings to potential customers in your local region. It is done via doing business awarness campaign with the help of banner ads and video ads.
For example, if you are opening a new food restaurant and you want to invite a large gathering at the opening ceremony. You can start advertising about your presence with offers to your local people with the help of video and display ads. Your potential ceremony attendees will see such ads on their mobile while they will be browsing Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or any other website in google partnered network.
This helps you in local business growth with the power of advertising at low cost.
4. Use Instagram search for finding the local influencers and customers.
Instagram is a great way to find people and customers from your local region. How to get this done?
It is super easy but first let’s understand how we can do a local business growth with this method.
- You can find local influencer with large following and connect with then to support you for growing your business in local area. Since they have large following so a shootout from them will increase your following as well.
- You can find people in local area who may need your service offerings. Example if you have a kitchen store. You can find local resturants posting contents related to foods and can pitch them to sell your kitchen store products.
So how to use Instagram for local business growth?
The steps are quite simple. I am sharing the screenshot for better understanding.
- Go to search bar of the Instagram and click the places tab.
- Click the nearby places option.
- Then you will find all your local region to choose.
- Click the nearest location listed according to your position.
Currently I am in Bokaro steel city, Jharkhand, India so, I am getting above mention location points. I will chose sector 4 if I have to find businesses or customers in my local area.
This way you can find options to connect and grow your business online.
5. Use the power of App notification
Local businesses generally don’t prefer building apps if they are very small scale businesses. But mobile apps if used wisely, can use used to stay in touch with local customers through mobile push notification.
How this measure works?
If you have a mobile app for example, a local resturant that also accept online orders and delivery at door step.
- Now you can create a dedicated app for your restaurant.
- Next, use steps 1, 2,3 and4 points explained in this blog above to increase your app download.
- Once almost 50-70% of people in your local region of business serving locations are archived then you can start this push notification option.
With push notification, you can do the following.
- Ping people in your region where traffic on roads are long and wait time is more than an hour, you can deliver food to people stuck in traffic jam.
- You can update new menu and give a notifcation to same to your app users .
- Also, you can give every update regarding your business to your app users.
The app push notification is not a good option for all businesses but it may be a great way for some of them.
Final Though
Local business growth is not a competitive market right now. The reason for low competition is because either people are not aware or they don’t know how to do all these setups.
Local business potential has growing exponentially. People want comfort and if they are available at doorstep then its a win win for both business and customers.
If you want to grow your business in the local area and need help then you can connect me for a free consultation and help.