Reaching a Local Customer Base with Online Marketing

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Internet marketing is great for reaching a geographically diverse audience, but many bricks-and-mortar businesses cater to a local audience.

For example,

If you’re a chiropractor in Sydney, then your patients will be located in Sydney.
If you’re a lawyer in Brisbane, then (the majority of) your clients will come from Brisbane.
If you’re a pest controller in New York, then you’ll be treating homes located in New York.

This article looks at effective local Internet Marketing techniques that I’ve used to promote my Internet marketing consulting business and also help my clients attract more customers using online marketing.

Why Local Internet Marketing?

Most local businesses are yet to harness the Internet as an effective marketing tool. In my view, they should start doing so. Local Internet marketing can be very cost-effective for two reasons:

1. Ability to target customers at the point of purchase: Like the Yellow Pages, people search on the Internet when they have a need for your products or services. This allows you to target the specific individuals who are most likely to become your customers. Most “offline” marketing methods such as newspaper ads or leaflet drops are not targeted. Not being able to target your potential audience adds greatly to your costs.
2. Weak competition:

Many local businesses use standard offline advertising strategies such as the Yellow Pages, but they don’t have an effective online presence. Whereas in the Yellow Pages, you’re surrounded by your competition, you have far fewer competitors online. Fewer competitors means higher conversion rates and lower marketing costs. In other words, online marketing represents a good arbitrage opportunity for local businesses.

Local Internet Search Growth

Do people really use the Internet to search for product and service providers in their local area? Most definitely yes. Many of my clients do very well out of local Internet marketing.

For example, this Brisbane-based Japanese language school generates almost all of their new clients from the Internet. They get 3 times more clients for half the cost of the offline marketing strategies that they used to employ.

Another example is Athletic Edge, a personal trainer in Brisbane. Their website generates at least 2 or 3 good leads per week for very little cost. Many of these leads turn into loyal clients who keep coming back again and again.

And industry publications such as DM News [sorry, subscription only, ] predict that the paid local search market will triple in 2006.

Local Internet Marketing Strategies

Local Internet marketing isn’t rocket science. As is any online lead generation situation, your website should be sales-focused and follow sound website conversion practices.

But the real key is generating targeted traffic. That means people searching for your product or service in your geographical area.

Here are my top 5 strategies for generating targeted local traffic. Some of these strategies will be more effective than others. My advice is to test and see which ones work for you.

Strategy #1: Google Adwords

Google Adwords is the bread-and-butter traffic generation technique of local Internet search. It’s easy to set up, highly targeted and cheap. Here are a few guidelines for building effective local campaigns.

1. Build highly targeted keyword lists that include your geographical area.

For example, if you’re a painter in Brisbane, some of your keywords might be:

house painter brisbane
painter brisbane
painting contractor brisbane
commercial painter brisbane
etc…

2. Write ads that feature your geographical location prominently

e.g.

Brisbane House Painter
Make Your Home Sparkle Like New
27 Years Experience and 7-point Guarantee
www.BrisbanePainter.com.au

3. Set up conversion tracking

Conversion tracking is a tool provided by Google Adwords that allows you to see which keywords are producing qualified enquiries and which keywords are wasting your money. Conversion tracking is the key to producing profitable campaigns.

4. Test different ads against each other

Test two ads against each other within each Adgroup to see which ad performs better. Continue until you have an ad that you can’t beat.

TIP: For local campaigns, don’t test more than two ads at a time. If you test more than two ads, it can take forever to get a significant result because the search volume for most local searches is low.

5. Test some generic search phrases too

By “generic”, I mean search terms that don’t include your geographical location. Some people who are looking for a house painter in Brisbane will search only for

house painter

So you should include generic search terms like this as well, preferably in their own separate Adgroup, to allow you to test the results more accurately.

In that Adgroup, include other place names as negative keywords.

E.g.

-Sydney
-Melbourne
-Adelaide
-Queensland
-New South Wales
-QLD
-NSW
etc.

(this is relatively easy in Australia because we just don’t have that many towns and cities here . In the USA, your list would be a lot longer, but it’s probably very much worth testing.)

A list of negative keywords like this will at least ensure that your ad will not appear when a user searches for a term such as

house painters sydney

that is outside of your service area.

TIP: Should you use Google’s geographical targeting function? My advice is, “no”. Adwords offers a tool that supposedly serves your ads only to those people searching from within the geographical area that you specify. So far, our testing has found this tool to be a bit buggy. Test this for yourself, but we’ve found that it’s better to spend a few dollars more overcovering than to miss out on potential clients by using the geographical targeting function.

Strategy #2: Search Engine Optimization for Targeted Local Search Phrases

A small book could be written on this point alone, but I’ll cover the bare bones only.

As mentioned above, local Internet marketing is not highly competitive at this time. So it is relatively easy to gain high search engine rankings for highly targeted search phrases such as

house painter brisbane

OK, your search volume may not be huge, but the quality of this local search traffic can be very high. Several of our clients achieve conversion rates from visitors into enquirers in the 10-20 percent area.

Here are a few tips for local search engine optimisation:

1. Target your search phrase carefully

The first rule of SEO is that you can’t be everything to all people. By focussing on one key phrase you’ll give yourself a much better chance of getting high rankings for that phrase. Lack of focus is the enemy.

A good way to choose which phrase to go for is to look at the conversion stats from your Google Adwords. Find a phrase that gives you a reasonable volume of searches and conversions, then target that phrase for natural (unpaid) search engine results.

Or you can use this default formula, which we have found to be successful in most situations:

[your location] + [your industry name]

e.g.

Brisbane house painter
Melbourne law firm
Sydney financial planner
etc.

2. Put your key search phrase in your homepage title tags.

title tags contain the text that appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser. Search engines rely to some degree on these tags to rank websites. Keep your title tags short, focussed and concise.

Our house painter might put this text in the title tag:

Brisbane house painter

In some cases, it may be hard to choose between two commonly used terms. In that case, try putting them both in:

Melbourne law firm – Melbourne lawyers

3. Build some backlinks.

Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. Backlinks tell search engines such as Google that your website is important, and important websites get higher rankings.

Again, this topic can be as advanced as you want to make it, but here are some simple guidelines for building backlinks to your website:

*** List your site in as many online directories as possible.
*** Trade or exchange links with other websites
*** Write articles about your area of expertise and link them back to your website
*** Start a blog, and link it back to your website
*** Buy links through link-buying services such as www.text-link-ads.com
*** Ask friends or associates who have websites to link to you

IMPORTANT: If possible, you want the text of incoming links to contain the keywords for which you want to rank well. One of our clients is Pink Pest Services. If they wanted to get high rankings for a targeted geographical search, rather than linking to them with their company name:

Pink Pest Services

it would be better to link to them using keyword-rich link text such as:

Sydney pest controllers

Link text is not always in your control, but it’s useful to keep in mind if you’re aiming for high rankings.

TIP: How to put link text back under your control – use a domain name that contains keywords such as www.SydneyBookkeeper.com.au, www.JapaneseBrisbane.com.au or www.BetterEdit.com. When other sites link to your site using your domain name as the link text (as they often do), your keywords will be included.

4. Use your keywords in your website content

Again, this can get very technical, but you’ll do fairly well just by including your keywords throughout your website content in a natural way (DON’T overdo it).

If possible, use your keywords in the headline and in the first paragraph of text, then here and there throughout the content.

Strategy #3: Other Pay-Per-Click Search Engines

If your campaigns are working well in Google Adwords, try other PPC [Pay Per Click] search engines such as Overture and Sensis [Australia]. In my tests to date, these services haven’t produced the ROI that Adwords does, but they can nevertheless add value.

Strategy #4:?Yellow Pages Online

This is mainly addressed at an Australian audience – the same may apply in other markets but you’d have to test for yourself.

Our tests have revealed that the Online Yellow Pages produces a better ROI than the print version – in some cases up to 10 times better. But it’s not for every type of business.

If the value of one new client to your business is relatively high ($500+), then the YP online is worth testing. It may not produce tonnes of leads, but it should be ROI-positive.

Strategy #5: Integrate your offline marketing promotions

It goes without saying that you should include your URL in as many of your “offline” promotional tools as possible (e.g. business cards, leaflets, newspaper ads, letterhead, signage etc.). But this alone is hardly likely to lead to many leads (despite what some marketers say).

You can accelerate your results if you draw special attention to your website in your offline promotions. For example, prompt prospects to download a Free Report or White Paper in your direct mail letters or space ads.

Extending Your Geographical Reach

This article is about local Internet marketing, but it’s worth commenting about the flipside. That is, extending the geographical reach of businesses that have traditionally been “local” operations.

Three examples:

Although my Internet consulting business is based in Brisbane, most of my clients come from outside of Brisbane. We liaise via phone and email with no problems.

Another of my clients, mortgage broker Loans Approved, extends their geographical range by dealing with clients from all around Australia (and sometimes overseas) via phone and fax.

Friend and client Yaro Starak from proofreading business BetterEdit uses his website to attract clients from all over Australia and the world.

In other words, the Internet allows you to break the rules of “traditional” business. The exact strategy you choose will depend on your industry, your business model and the kind of client that you want to attract. In a future article, I’ll comment more on specific strategies for extending your geographical reach.

In the meantime, good luck with your local marketing!

Will Swayne

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