Here are five Internet marketing strategies that I recommend every local business implement. By “local business,” I mean any business that operates within a specific geographic boundary, whether that’s a city, county or larger region. These five strategies will give you a definite competitive advantage.

1. Have a professional quality, clean, quick loading website. You should have your address and phone number on every page. The site should be easy to read, load quickly, and it should definitely look good on mobile devices. WordPress is the most popular platform for building a website that meets these requirements. As far as load time, a lot of that depends on the quality of your website hosting. I recommend you don’t just use cheap, shared website hosting. I recommend you use better quality hosting so that your site loads quicker and functions better.
2. Set up a Facebook business Page for your business and update it regularly, Monday through Friday. Follow and share content from other local businesses. Make it a participatory kind of thing. Have contests.

   Make it very visual. Every update to your Facebook page should have an image or graphic. Your page content should be interesting to look at.

   Also use paid boosts and ads to drive visitors to it and grow your following. And as you post content to your website, link to that content from your Facebook page and encourage others to share those updates.

3. Set up a Google My Business account. If you’ve ever done a search for a local product or service, you’ve probably noticed that some businesses show up on a map on the search results page. That information comes from a service called Google My Business.

   To set up Google My Business, visit https://business.google.com. When you sign up, you should provide complete information about your business and upload some photos. It also has a posts feature that I recommend you use. Using Google My Business is a way to inject yourself into search results conducted by people in your geographic market searching for what you sell. It is very likely that your local competitors are not taking advantage of it.

4. Set up citations. These are basically just listings of your business in local business directories. Examples are Yelp and Yellow Pages. It’s very likely your business is already listed there but not claimed. If your business is there, claim it. If not, add your business. Provide complete, detailed information.

   Citations will actually help you in your search visibility. So it ties into the whole thing.

5. Create content. This is what drives the whole thing. You’ve got to have content. I recommend you do articles, videos, infographics or whatever you can come up with to explain what you sell or what you do. A lot of your content should go on your website, and then used as a Facebook or other social media update, which will then link back to your website. Or sometimes it can go straight to your Facebook Page. The more content you can push out, the better. Every piece of content you put out is one more way for a potential customer to find you.

These five components fit together into a tight, well-integrated Internet marketing strategy. But there is some work involved. Does it work? Without a doubt. It will give you a clear competitive advantage because most of your competitors are not doing this. Or not doing it well. Follow these five strategies and you will absolutely…without a doubt…be successful.

If you could use some help implementing these strategies, contact Work Media at info@workmedia.net. We’ve been doing this a long time and would welcome the opportunity to discuss how we can help you grow your business.