Local search services allow businesses to meet customers in the "magic moment of search." Searching online may no longer seem like magic to the customer who has become accustomed to using their phone, tablet, or laptop to shop or find services, but it is magic when a business finds a ready customer through local search. Google's mission is to match up consumer intent in the immediate moment of their search, and local seo services can help organizations meet the consumer in that moment.
Local SEO services help your business appear at top of the page for the large percentage of searches that Google tags as "local." But here's the kicker--the majority of those searches are being completed on mobile devices. Google's explanation goes like this, “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries, including the US and Japan."
Finding the right mix for your marketing budget requires ongoing vigilance and regular adjustments. The shift toward digital media has pushed many organizations into a significant learning curve that can result in smart marketing. Much of the decision-making ends up being a wrestling match between "what we’ve always done" and attractive new opportunities. Beyond the tactical decisions over how much to allocate to various media, there lies a bigger opportunity.
Understanding how to evaluate and plan for local SEO services is an important part of digital marketing strategy for companies with both B2B and B2C products and services. Local search has become a big opportunity for any business that can define where their target customers live and work.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is continuing to change as the primary search engine providers (Google, Bing, Yahoo) make changes to their search results, which are all based in complex algorithms. SEO is really the art and science of presenting your product or services, while helping people who are searching for what you offer. One of the most important recent developments is the shift to localizing search results—the search engines now prioritize information that is geographically closest to the searcher.
No matter how much effort or money we invest in building our brand, there are two groups of people who ultimately decide how a brand story is shared. Employees and customers are the real brand storytellers. They define the value, reach, and impact of a brand. Success is achieved when we understand the role they play in our company narrative.
It wasn't really the internet, as a whole. It was web browsers -- namely Google, Bing, and Yahoo -- that were looking for real content on your website. As you know, these powerful search engines "crawl" your website on a regular basis. They are constantly indexing its content and structure. Since the end of 2013 search engines have learned something new, they want content that looks a lot more like a real conversation (its called "semantic search").
Digital storytelling reaches beyond the news and content that you post, to the web technology that delivers your brand. A web or social encounter is often the first experience your customer has with your business or nonprofit. Visitors to your digital properties are not just reading or seeing your story, they are experiencing it through the medium of your web properties.
You don't have to look far to see the shift toward story-based marketing. A quick glance through a magazine, prime-time television, even the latest Super Bowl ads makes it clear – stories are working as a way to tell brand stories. This is an important change in marketing trends, part of it due to the power of social marketing. Significant industry experts report that multiple corporate brands – ExxonMobil, Dow, Google, and IBM to name a few – have all upped the messaging related to their corporate story.
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