Local businesses need to excel in search engine optimization (SEO) to stay competitive with larger, national brands. Say a local business doesn’t show up on the first result pages when a consumer makes a search. How are they supposed to make their presence known to more than just the people who walk past their storefront? And an SEO campaign isn’t an easy thing to build and maintain alone. Local business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses need help from agencies that offer digital marketing services. Here’s how you can help prove that to potential clients.

Local B2C Businesses Need Help with SEO Campaigns

Boosting Local Rankings

Factors that contribute to local finder rankings are changing and being added to all the time. Just look at Whitespark’s 2023 Local Search Ranking Factors report. This report has grown over the years to feature 149 ranking factors that impact local pack/finder rankings. In this year’s report, two new factors were added:

Sustained Influx of Reviews Over Time (rather than bursts): It’s standard practice for brands to ask customers for reviews of their business and/or products. The problem is that, sometimes, if brands get a large influx of reviews all at once, they think that they can get by with just those reviews for a while. That’s not actually the case. Whitespark says that, “A business that is continually getting reviews on a regular basis sends the right signals to Google that it is an alive and active business that the public still cares about.” Local B2C businesses should always be asking customers for reviews.
Internal Links to GBP Landing page from Other Pages of Website: According to Whitespark, a business’s Google Business Profile Landing Page is the page that is linked to the GBP in the website field. Whatever page a business has as their GBP Landing Page needs to have good page authority. This is built with good internal linking: Having that page linked in the content of the brand’s other web pages (not just primary navigation, sidebar or footer links).

B2C brands have a lot to worry about when it comes to simply running and securing their own business. They probably don’t have time to keep up with the latest trends in boosting their online presence. That’s a big reason they need the help of an agency like yours to help them improve their SEO campaign.

Stop Acting on Myths

There are quite a few SEO campaign myths out there, according to Whitespark. And B2C businesses may believe in and act on a lot of them. The top SEO factors that some businesses act on that many businesses don’t believe impact rankings much, if at all, are:

Geotagging photos uploaded to the business's Google Business Profile
Adding keywords to their Google Business Profile description
Adding keywords in their owner responses to business reviews
Sum of transactions identified through credit card partners
Enabling the messaging feature of their Google Business Profile

Those are just five of 30 local SEO myths that your potential B2C clients may be wasting their time on. They need an agency with digital services to set them straight.

How is Their Online Presence?

Potential B2C business clients may not even know they need help with their SEO campaign without being shown the reality of how their digital presence is faring. You can run a Digital Audit on AdMall by SalesFuel to get an up-to-date report on a local business’s digital presence and how it compares to their competition. If you can show them that their online presence isn’t as good as they think it is, they’ll be more likely to listen to what you have to say about potential improvements.

Photo by Amelia Bartlett