If you’ve been reading the advice in our Digital Marketing blogs and wondering just how effective these tips and ideas can be, then take a look at these examples of how local businesses have prospered by putting them into practice.
When Self Storage Hampshire opened their first facility in Aldershot, UK they were unsure of how best to attract a local audience. Like the car repair workshop marketplace, the self-storage market is very targeted. So, to ensure valuable website visitors, Self Storage Hampshire made local SEO its focus. A fast loading mobile responsive website was built using WordPress; according to Google, ‘53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load… for every one second delay in site load time, conversions fall by 12%’. (For more information see our blog ‘Car service near me' – the rise of local searches and how to make them work for your garage).
The ‘Self Storage Hampshire’ brand name was then registered on Google Local and other directory listings to ensure good results from local searches. This was followed by the publication of search engine optimised articles. These articles provided useful information to meet the needs of local searchers. They included articles on subjects such as ‘Self storage packing tips’ and simple, practical pieces that helpfully listed the opening times of the local recycling sites. These are the kind of informative guides searched for by people looking to move house or create space in their home. These people were, of course, the target audience of Self Storage Hampshire. Additionally, via a bespoke phone number on their website, they were able to measure how many new leads came from their website.
With their lightweight, mobile-responsive website, plus original and useful content, traffic to the site significantly increased and soon the brand ranked No.1 on Google for over 20 local keywords. Source: The Content Works
US dentist Savannah Dental Solutions was unhappy with its Google search position of No.20 in the local map results, despite having created a website that would load easily and quickly and having set up all the relevant business directories.
For this business the answer was to issue four online press releases over a four-month period. The power of these press releases was in the citations – the mentions of the businesses name, address, and phone number (NAP) as these are essential for good local rankings.
When Google recognises that a searcher is looking for a local service, it often displays a map with local businesses listed below. To achieve a high ranking in these local search results, you must have citations - the more high-quality citations the better. Therefore, as an increasing number of websites published their press releases, the dentist began to climb the Google local rankings until they were No.1 on the first page of Google local results for their primary keyword ‘Savannah dentist’. Source: Main Street ROI
If this has whetted your appetite and made you wonder what you could do to help your workshop succeed by optimising for Google local searches, take a look at the Success Stories page on Google My Business. The video case studies here show how small businesses find, and interact with, local customers. Via Google, they can notify customers about new offers, see how many people are visiting their site and even gauge how busy they expect to be by observing the number of visits they see to their Google My Business page.
This blog demonstrates how businesses with challenges like yours have had success by paying attention to their Digital Marketing. It’s not as difficult as you might think, and it’s not something you have to do every day. Making a few small changes like, those mentioned here, can have a big effect on potential customers. They could be the difference that makes prospects not only see your website first, but also click on it and then use it to contact you.
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