If you thought inbound marketing was only for businesses looking to use the internet and other technologies to grow their global footprint, think again. Local inbound marketing, or local SEO, focuses on the geographical areas you operate in, and it’s a great way to find people or businesses in your area who are already looking for your products and services.
What Is Local Inbound Marketing?
Local inbound marketing uses the same principles as any inbound marketing, SEO or SEM strategy, but it adds a geographical element to the techniques. It helps to ensure that real world businesses get traffic and leads from people in the areas they operate in, who may buy from them. It’s a method of narrowing the funnel that inbound marketing creates even further, so that you’re focused on your exact target market. But how do you do that? There are several tried and tested strategies.
- Local site directories. These are internet directories that are geographically limited by country, state, or province. They’re a great way to get links from locally focused sites, which not only increases your inbound marketing overall, but also your local presence.
- Google Places is another must for companies or individuals who are focused on local inbound marketing. It’s a cheap, easy, and guaranteed way of ensuring that a brick-and-mortar business finds the customers they want, int he areas they want them.
- Adding geographical references to your keywords and phrases for SEO and SEM is another great local marketing idea. So instead of using words that are only related to what you do, use words that are related to where you are too!
- Local article directories are another great way to funnel people in your area to your page. They work exactly like the bigger article directories, but they’re limited geographically.
In a nutshell, local inbound marketing strategies use all the same principles, to achieve the same goal (getting people who already want what you’re selling to your site), but they add a geographical reference to all of those methods.
It’s a quick, easy, cost effective way to use inbound marketing strategies for businesses who have a limited geographical footprint, and like any other type of inbound marketing, it’s one of the most cost effective strategies out there.