How to market web design and SEO company locally
-
Hello,
I'm looking for easy (yah right, correct?) ways to market locally my web solutions company. I do web design, E-commerce web design, and I start informational and E-commerce companies for people starting at $1000/month - only new companies, later I'll do a little more E-commerce stuff.
Looking for inexpensive, fairly easy ways to market locally.
Thanks!
-
Russ,
Every detail of your answer is thoughtful and helpful. Thank you.
When I present to entrepreneurs, what would you recommend I talk about?
Bob
-
Hi Bob,
I second Russ' suggestion regarding real-world networking in your community. Chances are, you know more about marketing than most of your neighbors and if you can start using that expertise to benefit the community, the people you help will hopefully begin referring you to friends and family. Are there opportunities for you to present at local business meetings, such as chamber of commerce events? Could you host a seminar, geared toward a specific sector of the business community? Additionally, begin blogging regularly about the local business scene. Talk about important industries. Give free advice. Make friends.
From a purely local (as in Google local) standpoint, you are allowed to list your business only if you make face-to-face contact with your customers. Making that part of your business model will enable you to build citations, most of which are free. With good citations, reviews and the right organic strength, you can work toward local stack rankings.
Hope these thoughts are helpful and good luck to you!
-
First, do you have your own site up and working with a portfolio in place? If you do, some good basic local SEO can help you rank if you live in a fairly non-competitive area. You can start with something like Moz Local.
Once you have a portfolio in place, the next thing to do is start networking. Real relationships will get you off the ground faster than anything else. I would look for meetups of entrepreneurs, small business associations, etc. in your area. If there aren't any, try to set one up. You won't have a brand yet which you can lean to help you win contracts, so instead you will need to work on personal relationships.
Reach out to local SEM and marketing agencies to see if they are looking for web design / development partners for affiliate relationships.
Finally, sit down and write out every business you have visited in the last few years locally - every store, restaurant, etc. that might have a website. Go do some competitive analysis and see if any of them have poor sites compared to their competitors. Use that potentially as a hook to get them to sign up with you... "Hey, I love your restaurant and have been a customer for years, but I noticed your website isn't nearly as updated as soandso... maybe I could help".
Just a couple of thoughts off the top of my head. Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Trying to rank homepage nationally and internal pages locally?
We are a finance brokerage in Australia and we operate in a specialist niche and in regional areas with low competition but we have identified KW's that are very profitable to us but seem to need different approach re strategy. We specialise in Agribusiness lending. We have been pretty scrappy in the past with our SEO as it has always been done by me, and as a startup, as everyone knows, the jack of all trades can help and hinder! To date, we have done a lot of Adwords (and KW research) so I have a fair idea of what keywords I am after. Some KW are low competition and extremely profitable to us. But there is a difference between them on who our competitor is and how difficult it would be to rank and which strategy to use. For example Agribusiness, used by all major banks, now they provide agribusiness, but only via their own products, as we are brokers we tend to receive a lot of new leads as we are brokers and we can compare all products and as agribusiness can be quite complex this is a major point of difference for us. So my strategy to rank for this KW would include a national approach as we provide advice in this space on a national scale, which has worked well via AdWords leads. But would like to move away from my sole reliance on AdWords. Then we move onto KW that we have also had some success on a national scale via Adwords but the metrics suggest is better from a local perspective (local regional town), i.e hobby farm loan, rural finance, even home loans (when there is no other local competitor in small town). As we have brokers in other regional towns this also opens up an opportunity to have either internal pages with lots of local signals (i.e NAP, Authority outbound links, local KW, social signals from local FB groups etc). But can a internal page compete against a competitors HP, for example I was going to set up mysite/Toowoomba.com.au internal page with info re that broker and lots of local points, or am I best to create another site, i.e brandname-Toowoomba.com.au (still linking from my contact us page for Toowoomba) and focus solely on local for this site (including internal pages to rank locally, i.e Toowoomba Home loans)? the extra benefit is I then create another asset if I was to sell the region as a franchise (another discussion) So, my question is, can I mix my strategies without any issues, or should I create separate sites?
Local SEO | | AgLend0 -
Transfer Local SEO rankings to another domain
The question is specifically about local rankings, not the organic ones. My client recently acquired another Law firm. Acquired firm's website is ranking well in Google local and has a decent SEO authority. Its Google mybusiness page is also established and has a lot of positive reviews. Client's main website is comparatively new and doesn't currently rank well in Google local. The Google mybusiness page is sort of incomplete and doesn't have any review. Both businesses are listed in local directories (client's main business is listed in lot less directories and has fewer citations). The client wants to merge the newly acquired website with his main website, without losing Google local rankings the acquired website has. Or in other words, transfer newly acquired website's local rankings to his main site. Client wants to transfer the website to his main website in all cases while minimizing the damage. I'd transfer acquired website's content to main website, properly map the pages and place 301 redirects. Regarding Google my business pages, what would you suggest? I can either update main business NAP and Website address in Acquired business's mybusiness page, or transfer acquired business's mybusiness ratings to main mybusiness page via this form: https://support.google.com/business/contact/business_move_reviews I've also heard that Google support can merge two business page, however not sure about that. I'd also need to update the business listings and citations. Could you please suggest the best way of doing this? And have you practically tested it?
Local SEO | | Woofire0 -
Changing Your Company's Name
Our firm is considering adding another person and adding that person's name to the firm. In terms of our online presence, what all would have to be done for that to work? For example: 1. We aren't changing the domain, but should we get a domain with the new name and redirect it to our current site? 2. Do I need ask the people who have linked to our site with our name in the anchor text to change it to the new name? 3. Do I need to get back to all our old posts/blogs/etc and edit them with the new name? 4. Can we use our current social media names or do we need to setup new accounts? 5. If we decide to just keep the onsite marketing the same, but change the name in regards to offsite markeitng (banners, billboards, etc) will that conflict have a very negative effect? 6. Anything else, anyone wants to point out would be great. Thanks, Ruben
Local SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
SEO for a web based company with no physical presence.
Hi I only have experience working in Local SEO and now Im facing the challenge of 1 clients which is based in Australia and wants to sell in Australia (protein bars) but the company doesn't have a physical presence. What do you think would be a good strategy? Do you think I still need to create NAP citations (if so that would probably benefit the SEO for one city and leave the others with less SEO influence?). Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Nico
Local SEO | | niclaus780 -
Local SEO for B&B - Attracting International Customer
Hi Guys, Hope the MOZ expert community will be able to help me 🙂 What would be the best way to manage the SEO for a Bed and Breakfast ? As the B&B is in a touristic place in France attracting lots of German, American and British tourists, the website will be in French, translated in English and German. It will be set up under a .fr extension and using wordpress multisite for each languages, so it will look like this: French: www.mydomain.fr English: en.mydomain.fr German: de.mydomain.fr They'll roughly have the same content for the business part, but they'll have different articles on their respective blogs. Now my questions are: If I sign up to Google my business (http://www.google.com/business/) Would I be able to translate all my business descriptions, separate the reviews per language, use google+ for different language? If not, then should I sign up for the French version of "google my business" and then open 2 separate G+ pages for the English and German version ? Can I open 3 different "google my business" account for each language but with the same google account, same telephone number and same business address ? Should I actually "translate" my business name and create 3 separate website so I can open a "Google my business" for each, but then they'll still have the same address and phone number ? Basically, I want to find the best solution for people around the world to see the content in their own language (reviews, blog post...) and also show up on map listings for google.com /.co.uk / .fr / .de etc... Other social media: Facebook: should I have one page and target the English language for each post in English, etc... Or should I have 3 facebook page in each language ? Should I have 3 pinterest accounts, or should I create 3 boards for each language so I can describe each pictures in proper language Miscellaneous Don't hesitate to give me any other important tips that I should think about before launching ! After being an employee for many years, I want to rock my own business 🙂 Cheers
Local SEO | | LELOnic0 -
I'm starting an internet marketing company along with a newspaper company
I'm starting a project for a newspaper company where I just started working as the in-house SEO. I'll have ownership along with the newspaper for this new internet marketing company and could use some advice.Should I build our new site on the newspapers domain with good pr already or start a fresh site from square one. I'm trying to weigh out the pro's and cons and I'm still undecided.This news company has been around since the 50's and the trust is there. But just one sticky situation with an uneducated client could hurt the reputation of the newspaper.Your thoughts please!
Local SEO | | onetwotree0 -
SEO planning: Franchise/multiple local sites
I am in the planning stages of franchising a cleaning business and was wondering if anyone had some ideas on SEO strategy. If money were no object and I had a team of hundreds of copywriters at my disposal, would the ultimate solution be to have the following sort of URL structure www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city within which there are numerous www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city/local-town pages? If this is the best strategy then is it worthwhile to begin work towards ranking for cities and local towns within them prior to actually operating there? I understand that lack of physical presence will penalize me in terms of local search but would a lack of physical address and phone number render any foundation work pointless (for example, prior to having any franchises in say London, would it be worth while building quality content and links on a www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london page, and then www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london/notting-hill, alongside a blog and so on?) Interested to understand the best way to go about this given the enormity of the campaign! Thanks
Local SEO | | EdwardoUK0