At our warehouse we talk to many local machine shop owners that are strapped with finances. A lot of them are in need of selling their CNC machines due to being strapped with cash. Because of this many machine shop owners can’t afford to higher an agency to work on their search engine optimization, especially with the growing opportunities within Local. Below are some of the things any business owner can do to start getting better results on Google maps. This is a quick guide that will help you understand the to-do’s and next steps.

Understanding Local

According to BrightLocal 97% of people find out more about a local company through the internet in 2017. And the fact is that if your business is not within those searches you may be missing a lot of opportunities. There are 3 main aspects to understanding the method of ranking for local. Those 3 steps are “relevance”, “authority” & “proximity”.

Relevance

There are 2 main factors to building relevance. First you want to build a NAP consistency. NAP stands for Name, Address & Phone number. Any websites that contain your business information must match all of the rest of the sites. Make sure your business name, address, phone number, categories of your business all match within directories. You can clean this up yourself by googling your business name and phone number. Make an excel sheet of each link and go one by one claiming the profiles you’re currently in and fixing these errors. Second is applying relevance to your website. You want to optimize your website to be fast, user friendly and add relevant content about your products or services. Make sure to create pages about what you offer and gear it towards the users experience. In time this method will prove to also help you with basic search engine optimization.

Authority

Building authority is not difficult but can consume your time. The idea behind this is to create the opportunity to have your business in the right directories. There are many paid platforms that help you do this, those include Yext, Whitespark, Brightlocal, and Moz local. This however can be done by you. The method I use is simple, I take the competitors ranking high on Google maps and I write down their business name and phone number. I run a few searches based on the keywords I want to rank for to find the top 3 competitors. Once you have identified these competitors you start your Google search by typing in their business name and phone number. What you will get is results that include business directories they currently are listed on. With an excel sheet copy and paste the directories your not part of and once finish join them. Keep in mind that you want to stay consistent with NAP like mentioned above.

Proximity

Google prefers local over anything else. What that means is that Google will show you results based on your GPS location. If your business is closer to the client then your competitor Google will show your competitor to be higher in rankings then yourself. This is normal with Google, but you can still beat your competitors by engaging in local marketing outreach. Brand awareness drives trust, so when your experimenting and investing in things like non-profit events, local event sponsorships, and feel-good donation opportunities these things tend to impact your community. The main idea is to build your brand by making and impact and the proximity factor may not be as important of a factor.

In Conclusion

Digital marketing doesn’t have to cost you money, just time and a few resources and you can achieve results. As a small business owner there are a lot of challenges and obstacles, this should not be one of those obstacles. You can achieve success without having to spend a lot of money.

Source:via Jonathan Alonso via CNC Machines.net

More information:

On CNC Machines official website.