Using Local Search and Location-Based Marketing to promote your business

The 7^th free Online Marketing Lesson of StayOnSearch is about Local Search. The author explains why the local search is becoming more and more important and shares few tips on how to optimize our local business listings (complete profile, proper categories, business proximity, local reviews, listing verification etc).

In the lesson there is a list of useful tools and services that can help us submit, check, optimize and manage our listings. Additionally the ebook provides a list of do’s and don’ts that can help you optimize the content of your pages and your rankings (add your address/city/phone in your texts and meta-description, create individual location pages, avoid duplicate content, avoid keyword stuffing etc).

Later in the course, we can find information about Micro formats. The author explains why they are important and how they can be used to help search engines find useful info about your business, illustrating all above with a useful example on how to use them.

The next part of the ebook describes briefly how using Local Group Deal Sites can help your business. It is suggested that selling through group deal sites can help you gain exposure, increase your brand awareness and reach new audience.

Finally in the last part of the course, we find information about Location Based Marketing. The author explains that the wide-spread use of Smartphone devices can help us reach more effectively our target audience by sending them a targeted marketing message on their telephones, create new services and inform potential clients about special offers while being near our shop. Last but not least he mentions 2 new innovative social media networks (Foursquare and Gowalla) that can help you promote your business and increase customer loyalty.

Once again we strongly recommend signing up for the free 10-week course since it can help you optimize your local business listings and find new ways to promote your company.

Additional Resources

If you want to learn more about how to use effectively the various social media networks and promote your business, we suggest you reading the following articles:

• The article “6 ways to optimize your business with Foursquare” explains how and why you should use Foursquare to promote your business and it describes 6 simple ways to do it.
• The article “Successful Marketing campaigns in social media to target women” describes how you can develop campaigns in social media networks that target on women.

Images by SearchEngineWatch