Everything You Need To Know About Hyperlocal Marketing

Published by : Vicinus

Date : January 7, 2021

Everything You Need To Know About Hyperlocal Marketing | Vicinus.ai

Like local marketing, which would limit searches to cities, districts, or regions, hyperlocal marketing is optimising searches for focused localities such as neighborhoods, towns, streets, and spots located near well-known landmarks. Although it may seem that advertisers who use ‘hyperlocal’ searches are focusing too narrowly, it’s actually quite the opposite. Hyperlocal SEO can target customers where they are, rather than casting a wide net.
Below, we will answer these questions:
  • What is Hyperlocal SEO/Marketing?
  • Local SEO vs Hyperlocal SEO
  • Why is Hyperlocal SEO Important?
  • Benefits of Hyperlocal SEO
  • Building a Hyperlocal Presence Online
  • How can I Improve my Hyperlocal SEO?
  • How do I set up a Hyperlocal Marketing Campaign?
  • Vicinus can help you
hyperlocal marketing vicinus

What is Hyperlocal SEO/Marketing?

As touched on above, hyperlocal marketing is simply focusing on a highly-specific set of customers located in a geographically restricted area. This can be a few blocks or streets or a little further than this.  Hyperlocal marketing usually targets ‘near me’ searches on mobile devices. For example, a hyperlocal search would sound something like “Coffee Shops Near Me”. These types of searches will show up on a mobile device in a listed format. This means that the top searches being the businesses which are optimised for this kind of search. The higher the search in the listing, the more likely the customer is to use the business. hyperlocal search vicinus

Local SEO vs Hyperlocal SEO

Although both of these forms of SEO are similar in a lot of ways, local and hyperlocal SEO are very different too, depending on your goals. So, what is the difference between local SEO and hyperlocal SEO?  Local SEO focuses on larger geographic locations such as cities or even regions.  However, hyperlocal SEO is much more targeted than local SEO as it focuses on specific neighbourhoods, streets, or even landmarks. This type of focused hyperlocal SEO is great for driving foot traffic to your website.  Google maps vicinus.ai

Why is Hyperlocal SEO Important?

Hyperlocal SEO is such an important part of marketing strategies as its primary purpose is to drive foot traffic to physical locations. Especially for multi-location businesses, hyperlocal SEO has a strong commercial intent and intends to take advantage of those ‘near-me’ searches.

Hyperlocal SEO’s Increased Popularity

With these ‘near me’ searches becoming increasingly popular over the recent years, hyperlocal SEO has become an essential part of optimising your local marketing campaign. Google suggests that these ‘near me’ searches have grown by 130% between 2014-2015 with Google users searching for a wide variety of products and services. This means that the popularity of hyperlocal marketing has risen at the same time as this rise in ‘near me’ searches over the past few years.  However, it’s not just this rise in the use of mobile devices for location-based results which has led to an increase in ‘near me’ searches. Google itself has been shaping these types of searches. By prioritising fewer and high-quality Google Maps results, Google even makes recommendations at the bottom of the SERP. It has also started to provide additional results under ‘Discover more places’ too. vicinus near me searches

Benefits of Hyperlocal SEO

  1. Easier to Compete

Hyperlocal SEO is easier to compete for keywords as there are fewer businesses in that exact location. This means that hyperlocal SEO can be great for businesses with a smaller budget for local SEO.

2. Easier to Find your Business 

Hyperlocal SEO results are usually displayed to people when they are within the location of your business. This means that customers can easily reach your business when searching for products and/or services within the area they are in.

3. Search Results Highlighted in Google Maps

The results of a customer’s hyperlocal searches show in Google Maps and show other actions such as ‘call’ and ‘directions’. This makes it easier for your customers to be able to find your business online. marketing vicinus

Building a Hyperlocal Presence Online

Building your hyperlocal presence online is less daunting than you may think. Below are some of the ways you can start building your hyperlocal presence.

  1. Optimising GMB Page

GMB pages show many essential details businesses need to show online in order to appeal to their potential customers. GMB shows details such as address, working hours, phone numbers, and popular times. Having this listing available, your chances of showing up on the local three-pack are heightened. GMB even offers features like reservations, consultations, menu listings, and more which can be useful, depending on what your business provides. Make sure that you also take into account the following in order to optimise your listings:
  • Distance. For Google to rank your listings higher, adding your location is necessary as well as creating landing pages for each location you have.
  • Prominence. This is creating high-quality links, images, reviews citations, and more.
  • Relevance. This can be optimised by targeting keywords that match your chosen search queries with detailed information about your company too.
MYTHBUSTER: Hyperlocal SEO is too limiting. TRUTH: Hyperlocal SEO is a focused strategy, working to target searches nearby and find potential customers for foot traffic.  google my business vicinus

2. Optimising Voice Search

In 2020, 50% of all searches online are voice-orientated with people using mobile searching more and more.  Voice search can be optimised by:
  • Brainstorming a list of questions and long-tail keywords.
  • Creating content based on these keywords and questions. This should include keywords such as ‘near me’, ‘close by’ and ‘nearby’.
  • Make a structured data markup. This will allow Google to feature your content in local search results.
  • Optimise website for mobile results. As detailed above, mobile searches have grown over the past few years, so ensuring that your website is optimised for mobile searches is necessary.
  • Create actions in Google App and build custom skills in Alexa.
voice search vicinus

3. Localised Content

Creating locally-relevant content will help you create long-term trust from your customers as well as relationships with them too. As touched on above, make sure that the content you create is optimised for location-based keywords which will help you rank higher in search results.

4. Creating Individual Landing Pages

This will allow you to maximise your online visibility for each location as well as to rank naturally higher on location-based searches too. Ensure that each landing page is personalised for the specific area, using keywords such as city names, addresses, towns etc. Local listing management graphic

5. Track your Progress

This is an essential part of any marketing campaign, not just hyperlocal. In order to find out whether your efforts have been worth it, make sure that you monitor your progress and adjust accordingly.

6. Building an Online Presence

Ensuring that your business has an online presence in this digital world is essential for every part of your business. Make sure you have an optimised website, consistent social media presence, customer reviews, listings and a consistent style of NAP information too. google maps vicinus

How can I Improve my Hyperlocal SEO?

There are a few ways in which you can improve your hyperlocal searches. Take a look below for the top ways to improve this:

GMB (Google My Business) Listings

GMB is one of the best ways of increasing your visibility in hyperlocal searches.  Google sources most of the information it uses in its search results from GMB listings and Google Maps results.  This means that adding details to your GMB listings such as business name, address and other factors helps Google to show accurate information. Business man pointing at 5/5 stars on the screen.

Customer Reviews

Reviews are such an effective way of showing your potential customers the quality of your services and products. Potential customers often stop at the reviews section of your website and/or listing before visiting physical locations. Additionally, customer reviews can also be used to signal important ranking in local SEO, making them incredibly important for hyperlocal marketing.

Distance

Proximity is used as a GMB ranking signal. The distance between the user and the local business serves the user’s local results in clusters.  Man on phone searching in front of laptop for local seo blog

How do I set up a Hyperlocal Marketing Campaign?

Hyperlocal marketing can limit adverts to specific geographic locations. Below are some ways you can set up ads to focus on hyperlocal marketing.

Google Advertising and Hyperlocal Marketing

Before you even begin to set up a hyperlocal marketing ad with Google, you must first ensure that your geolocation settings are correct. Make sure that your radius targeting is centered on your physical location and that the radius is approximately 1-2 miles from your physical store. This small, targeted location works to create a hyperlocal and very focused campaign, centered around your store. However, you must also consider keywords and intent when building a hyperlocal Google ad.  For example, if the campaign is for a coffee shop in Newcastle, placing a bid on keywords such as ‘coffee Newcastle’ would be good to try and attract business from this neighbourhood. You can also target keywords like ‘near me’ in your hyperlocal marketing campaign too in addition to the locally-focused keywords as above. social media vicinus.ai

Hyperlocal Facebook Ads

Below are our top four ways to optimise your Facebook ads for hyperlocal searches.

Local Awareness Facebook Ads

This style of Facebook ads was introduced in 2014. They are used to raise awareness for the physical location of your business to drive foot traffic to the location. It’s a very simple and effective way to create a hyperlocal ad on Facebook as it requires only a few steps to make:
  • Entering the address of your location
  • Choose your desired radius
  • Choose your custom target audience
  • Daily budget

Local Insights for Facebook

This data can be used to create a hyperlocal ad as it connects the target audience by making sure that the ads are in the right place at the right time. You can access these insights from the ‘Pages’ section on Facebook and adjust the settings of your ad campaign. This should be based on the graph which shows the number of people nearby the local business, and even down to the time of day which is busiest. However, only generalised data is shown.

Refining Audience by Location on Facebook

In Facebook ads settings, you can adjust the radius around your location using the slider or numerical values.  However, radius targeting does not spam country borders. This means that if you’re wanting to create an ad that spans country borders, two separate ad campaigns will have to be made in order to target these two different locations.

Refining Audience by Individual on Facebook

Once the above location has been achieved on Facebook, you must then make sure that the individual you’re wanting to target is also specified.  There are a few ways you can do this:
  • Everyone in the specified location. 
  • People living in the location.
  • Customers who have recently visited a location.
  • Potential customers travelling to and within this location.
This creates hyperlocal advertising which will increase footfall to your physical location. Vicinus listing distribution network graphic. Shows cartoon people picking up social media and online platform icons and putting them on a phone screen.

Vicinus can help your Hyperlocal Marketing

Vicinus is an AI-powered hyperlocal marketing platform that can help you to drive more calls, store visits, leads & website redirections.
  • Manage business listings from a central platform
Real-time management of all your locations from one easy-to-use platform. Help customers find only up-to-date and consistent information about your brand.
  • Lock and protect business listing from external edits
Protects listing data, eliminates external alterations, and prevents online scams and lead cannibalisation. Keeps your consumer-facing information intact.
  • Publish listings across multiple platforms
Create citations and publish data across search engines, maps, apps, social networks, online directories, and data aggregators to make your business more visible to customers.
  • AI-powered check on the brand reputation
Artificial intelligence-powered image analysis ensures that the best business images are present, in order to maintain a great brand reputation.
  • Machine learning for customer reviews
Machine Learning-led sentiment analysis gathers location-specific consumer insights. This means that it can also assist with review auto-respond to build customer trust in business.
  • Auto-trigger offers, posts, events, alerts on Google
Leverage automation to manage multi-location offers across platforms to attract more customers in their buying mode. Vicinus contact us graphic. Email address: contact@vicinus.ai. Visit website: https://vicinus.ai Feel free to drop us an email at contact@vicinus.ai if you would like to learn more. Alternatively, book a free demo! contact us vicinus
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