Softwired Blog

Local business SEO is an important tool for small businesses. Research shows that 46 percent of all Google searches are seeking local information. Local SEO work is the best way to ensure that a business website will appear in search engine results to drive more visitors to your site and your storefront. But, what does Local Business SEO work involve?

Today’s business owners know they need a great website that leads potential clients through the buyer journey, a social media presence to convey their brand and communicate with customers and a way to show authority in their niche so search engines will rank them well on search engine results pages. The problem for most business owners, however, is that they have no idea how to accomplish these things; for some it’s that they don’t have the time. Another challenge faced by many small businesses and start-ups is that budget constraints can be limiting. This is where finding the right digital marketing agency to help comes into play. The trick is to find an agency that understands your vision, can provide up-to-date advice for your needs and can carry it all out within your budget.

Technology and web development trends change all the time. If you’re a business looking to form a relationship with an agency partner to support your web development and digital marketing needs, you will want to make sure they have the skills to support you in 2020. These skills include HTML, CSS, CSS reprocessing, testing and de-bugging, responsive web development, JavaScript, version control and programming.

At least 37% of the world’s websites are built on the WordPress platform. It’s an extremely popular option for small to mid-sized businesses, especially. As a result, there are a lot of business owners looking for professional support for their WordPress websites. When looking for WordPress support services, it’s important to understand why you need support in the first place, identify your specific needs and find a WordPress expert who provides these services at a cost you can afford.

A business’ online presence has been important for at least the last decade but today, with more people stuck at home and nervous about shopping in stores due to the Coronavirus, the importance of digital sales cannot be overstated. Second to digital marketing and digital sales are the relationships that businesses build and manage. More and more businesses are investing in customer relationship management (CRM) applications and strategies in order to better their ability to interact with and adjust their responses to their customers. A CRM is a set of applications that a business uses to manage their customer data from across different communication channels such as live chats, emails and phone calls. Data collected may include personal information, purchase history and preferences, complaints or concerns, and keyword patterns. The CRM allows managers to review the data from interactions with their customers in real-time, which means businesses can react to it quickly to adjust their customer relationship methods as needed.

Local business SEO is important for any business with a bricks and mortar location in a given city or town. Yes, even the mom and pop shop that’s been around forever needs to work on local business SEO. You see, all businesses with a physical storefront need to have an online presence these days. Local business SEO is a series of tools used by digital marketers to help local businesses build their customer base and convert web visitors to customers (conversions).

Digital marketing is a type of marketing that uses the internet, devices with online access, websites, web content and social media platforms to market products and services to customers and increase brand awareness and loyalty. Digital marketing services take on many forms from web design, blogging and social media posting, to SEO, optimization and digital advertising.

Local business SEO* is a variation of SEO. It is the process of optimizing your online presence to attract more business from relevant local searches. By contrast, SEO is optimizing for relevant searches without the location qualifier. The way it works is that people search for products or services for sale in their geographic area to find a local business selling what they are looking for. A list of results then shows up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Local SEO increases your business’ ranking results and visibility on location-qualified searches.

When we talk about inbound marketing we mean the process of attracting leads to your website with relevant content and then nurturing their needs through the sales funnel until they become a paying customer. The first step in inbound marketing is creating relevant content on a regular basis and the best way to do that is by setting up a blog. As HubSpot designers, our agency partners have access to a great blogging platform. The second step in inbound marketing is to capture leads having readers click on a Call to Action (CTA) button that leads to a landing page. The third step is to create a contact form linked from a button on the landing page that allows the business to gather more information about the potential lead. One of the best things about choosing the HubSpot platform for blogging, landing pages and forms is that it allows business owners to analyze performance so they know what content is driving traffic and what content should be edited.

There is no doubt that Coronavirus is wreaking havoc on our physical and mental health, wrecking travel plans and keeping us from visiting with our friends and extended family. It’s also having a devasting impact on the economy and unemployment rate as some businesses are forced to shut down and others are losing revenue as their clients cancel orders. But this isn’t the time to give up. We know that stay at home orders won’t last forever and we hope to see businesses thriving again as soon as possible.