How to Drive More Foot Traffic with Local SEO (While Respecting Social Distancing Measures)

It’s no secret that safety measures for COVID-19 have sent the business world into a tailspin of trying to figure out what works best for them on an individual basis. Lockdown measures have significantly affected foot traffic for many local businesses for over a year now, and it’s crucial for said businesses to amp up the number of customers that can now walk through the door without putting them at risk or violating community COVID laws.

Now, local search engine optimisation is fantastic for bringing clientele through the front doors of your business, but at the same time, you’ve got to ensure that bringing more people into your brick and mortar location doesn’t violate social distancing measures, which will put your business at risk as a whole.

We’ve all seen what happens to businesses that don’t follow COVID-19 protocol, including facing fines and closure without limited available hours as an option. So, how can you safely up your local SEO game without falling victim to facing violations and putting your customers at risk by allowing them to congregate? At Click Squad, we’ve got a few ways to shift the winds of change in your favour.

The Lowdown on Local SEO

Many business owners that choose to work without the help of a professional digital marketing team completely miss out on a really important aspect of their strategy…local search engine optimisation. Local SEO is vital if you have a location that draws foot traffic. In fact, it’s typically much easier to rank your website on Google at a local level than it is national, so if you have that space for those in your community to come to see you, you’ve got to play that up within your SEO.

Local SEO is a little different from national or even worldwide focused SEO because it heavily depends on reaching those that live near you. Local SEO is popular with businesses such as medspas and physicians’ offices but can be successfully utilized by any small business looking to gain traction locally.

In a time of retail giants dominating the online market, the call for local SEO has become more important than ever. Online shopping is huge and has only proceeded to explode since the onset of the pandemic. When local businesses invest in local SEO, they’re essentially investing in reaching local consumers that are ready and willing to invest in their businesses right now.

Don’t be mistaken, Google fully understands the importance of local business, and will reward businesses that comply with local SEO guidelines and implement the best practices. Local SEO is never a waste of time unless of course, you employ it incorrectly.

The Benefits of Local SEO

We’ve made our case of local SEO and the fact that it’s beyond beneficial for local businesses that want to increase their presence online and in the surrounding community. However, there are many perks to local SEO that may come unexpectedly once you launch your strategy.

Incredible Web Presence in Your Local Niche

A good rule for every business is to pick a very targeted niche to begin, and then branch out as you gain traction and develop a marketing strategy that will appeal to a wide range of consumers. A local SEO plan that targets your local niche will help you shoot to the top of Google page one. When this happens, anyone that uses your keywords to search locally will be presented with your website and information on the first page of Google. If you’re running a paid ad, you’ll likely find yourself in the top spot.

Drum Up More Calls

A great local SEO strategy will drum up plenty of phone calls from local leads. Getting a potential customer on the phone is a fantastic way to begin a relationship with them, and you’ll find that local SEO is more than capable of making this happen, especially ensuring that your business is listed correctly on business directories such as Google Business and Yelp.

Increased Sales Revenue

As a whole, proper SEO means an uptick in sales revenue. If it didn’t increase sales, it’s unlikely that business owners would bother and marketing companies that specialize in SEO would cease to exist. General SEO gains sales (period) and local SEO gains local sales. When using local SEO as a means to increase business, 72% of consumers that did a local search visited a store presented to them that was within 5 miles of their home. Without question, local SEO works.

Effective Marketing Campaigns

Local SEP allows for specifically targeted marketing campaigns that shine a light on your business to your local audience that tells them exactly how you can solve their problems. Since 18% of smartphone purchases lead to a sale within 24 hours, whether it be online or in-store, an effective local SEO marketing campaign is essential to have!

More Business Does NOT Mean More COVID

It has been ingrained in our brains over the last year that more people in one place means a very high probability of contracted the virus that causes COVID-19. While this is true, more foot traffic for your business does not have to mean a higher risk of COVID, both for you and your employees.

You can step up your foot traffic, no pun intended, without raising the risk of spreading COVID-19 by following all state guidelines when it comes to controlling the virus. Sticking to regulations and understanding them as they change, is crucial to maintaining a local business amid the pandemic.

Click Squad Can Help

Click Squad has been in the business of helping local entrepreneurs and family-owned businesses get a hold of local foot traffic long before the pandemic began, and we’ll be here to help long after. We specialize in local SEO, and we are waiting to help you create and launch your strategy today.

It’s been a long year, and you deserve all of the online and local presence in the world. Call us today