Local Search, Digital Marketing & Their Love Child – Local Marketing

Digital Marketing, Local Search & their love child – Local Marketing

Marketing, what?
We live in an increasingly futuristic world powered by algorithms that map our every move on people graphs & social media. These gave rise to new metrics like likes, shares & retweets- and in all the hullabaloo we often forget what the core of marketing is all about.

The end goal of all marketing is to promote a business and in turn help the business make money $$$.

This is not an oversimplification, by any measure. In fact, it is the simple truth that often even marketers are not willing to acknowledge.

The power of Social Media cannot be denied, we live in an age of branding by engagement. All post likes, shares, retweets are nothing but metrics of engagement. The more engaged your audience gets, the more the system pushes your brand to a larger audience. Be it Facebook, Google, Twitter or Tumblr, they all believe in the same principle, i.e.

“If some people like it, it must be good, show it to some more and continue the expansion of audience till the ‘it’ in question no longer is liked by enough people to continue expanding the audience”

– It’s a combination of organic growth and content decay.

It is an honest and commendable approach but like any other system or idea, it too has its flaws and breaks. It often draws up boundaries which cannot be crossed or are not to be crossed.Especially when you consider that this organic growth that is touted with such integrity can be pushed further up by simply putting in a few extra dollars to the kitties of these providers.

But marketing, right from its inception has been a dishonest profession. The whole idea of marketing is to break the system, to find the cracks that haven’t been papered. To cross that boundary that one mustn’t. All to acquire customers at a lower cost than your competitors.

Local Search, Digital Marketing & their love child – Local Marketing.

Every SEJ reader knows about Local Search and Digital Marketing so there’s no need to define them. But a case has to be made about how Local Marketing came about.

Google’s search algorithm is more and more localized i.e. a user gets more results featuring businesses that are in close proximity to his/her location.
To put things simply –

A search for a service or product will throw up results which will allow you to purchase the product or get the service from a list of top vendors near you.

eg. A search for “washing machine repair” will throw up this result-

A similar search for pizza will give this result –

What you see in these screenshots if often referred to as the Local 3-pack which may now become a Local 2-pack with 1 paid result within the 3 pack.

So, this system of localized results, not only via the Local 3-pack, but in regular and map results as well, led to the birth of Local SEO and Local Marketing-

Local Marketing focuses on online visibility- Get found

Stay Engaged
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of Local Marketing is anticipating and overcoming change. Just in the past few months we have observed multiple changes in Google’s algorithm affecting Localized Search Results –

In April, Google updated its guidelines marking significant change in how Google’s algorithm will affect Local Results. Andrew Shotland wrote this post on how Local SEO is working in 2016 as recently as August 1st. Even more recently, Local SEO expert Joy Hawkins has revealed the latest algorithm update, coined Possum. There have been several changes made in between as well, the year has seen Google crack down on spam and several old Black Hat techniques have been countered by Google as well.

These changes can drastically affect your search rankings and online visibility

So,What Can Synup’s Local Marketing Automation Do For SMB’s?

There is only one search algorithm but there are a gazillion ways people have tried to beat the algorithm. Synup does not in any way claim to beat this algorithm and make your business pop-up magically on Google. What it does do is set up the groundwork for you!

Synup works on the three aforementioned pillars of Local Marketing-

1. Getting Found.
2. Staying Engaged.
3. Adopting Change.

Google aggregates its data in two primary ways i.e. using its web crawlers to collect information while supporting that information with data gained from large data aggregators such as Infogroup and Neustar. <link to whiteboard video>

Synup takes your business information and pushes it to several business directories and data aggregators. It also fishes out and suppresses duplicate listings for your business  – while this does not make your business automatically pop-up on top of the search results( though this has happened in several cases), it does give Google’s crawlers enough data for Google to recognize the business. The whole idea is to build proof for your business by listing your business accurately and consistently on several high authority websites. – This is how you Get Found!

Now that you can be found, you need to be liked by customers and what’s the biggest online proof for good businesses? Yes, its Online Reviews, it even makes logical sense according to the approach taken by most systems to promote what other people seem to like. A large part of the problems with reviews is that there is no one unified platform for reviews – Yelp, Google, Foursquare & Facebook are perhaps of the most importance for reviews but sentiment analysis algorithms have ensured that random review on twitter or even blogs are taken into consideration by Search Engines.

A customer sending a review is not the end of a review cycle, rather most platforms allow businesses to respond back to these reviews. You can or rather you must reply to all reviews especially bad reviews. Synup consolidates all your business reviews and give you a single reputation management platform that informs you every time there is a review for your business and you can reply from right there. That’s how a business Stays Engaged by controlling its own online story.

One cannot stop change, but change can be observed and strikes can be pre-empted.

Now that your business can be found and is engaging your audience. You can continue your efforts in content and value creation so that you get an even higher ranking.

What can Synup do for agencies?

The core team of Synup began as an agency so we’ve especially crafted our agency offerings with great care and immense understanding of the inner-working of an SEO agency, thanks to several ex-agency SEO professionals working with the Product Team.

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