The Ready-to-Buy Psychology of Local Online Marketing

The internet is not just a global medium. It’s a powerful local medium. No matter where you live, people are searching for the service you provide with a local modifier: “[your city] [your service]” (like “Chicago dog walker” or “Kansas plumber”).

Marketing with this “[your city] [your service]” technique has some advantages: It’s faster to achiever higher search engine ranking placement and it costs less because you’re not competing against larger multinational conglomerations with huge search engine optimization budgets.

But there’s something else that is important to consider about the psychology of searchers who are searching locally. Let’s say you are thinking of buying a car. You type in “car” into a search engine and see what comes up. Maybe you narrow it down by manufacturer.

So, let’s say that as you do your research you go from searching for “car” to searching for “midsize car” to searching amongst “general motors”, “ford”, “dodge”.

This is all at the conceptual level; the research level. What happens when you’re ready to buy? You don’t just type in “Ford dealership”.

No. If you live in Atlanta, you type in “Atlanta Ford dealership”… Notice that’s the [your city] [service] search.

So, the psychology of people search locally is this: They are ready to buy.

The web is a powerful research tool, but the terms used to research are general and broad. Searchers hit credible, authoritative sites to get more information. And when they’re ready to buy? They add a local modifier and look to a solution provider in their neighborhood.

Search Engine Marketing as a Branding Tool

The hidden story of search engine marketing

Search engine marketing serves the most obvious purpose of attracting traffic to your site. But that’s not the only work it does. It positions you; it brands you. In this blog, we’ll look at six ways that you can strengthen your brand and, as a result, strengthen your search engine marketing:

1. Define your business and services. While many businesses think they can define their business and their services, they are really just defining them from an industry insider’s perspective. Instead, define your business and your services from a customer perspective: To use one real-estate-related search engine marketing example: People won’t search for “I want a real estate agent”; they’ll search for “I want to buy a home.”

2. Developing your marketing materials and your story. You can’t do it all; there are simply too many marketing options out there. So, decide what your story is (summarize it like an elevator pitch) and then decide which of the many marketing options available are best to relate your story. Be sure to develop a mix of search engine marketing and offline marketing to get a good mix.

3. What makes your brand stand out? Every brand needs to have something unique; otherwise you’ll just get lost in the crowd. As you build up a reputation online, people will start to search for what makes you unique. This also helps local search engine marketing as well if your brand is related to a narrowly defined geographic area.

4. Building and managing your brand online. This is where search engine marketing comes into play: While you’re creating content to push or pull traffic to your website, that content is also establishing your brand. By the time people get to your website they are already familiar with who you are, what you do, and what makes you unique.

5. Manage your brand reputation online.  Search engine marketing is not a “set it and forget” effort. You need to be consistent and strategic in order to maintain your reputation. Develop a search engine marketing strategy that has a long-term timeline with plenty of short-term effort spaced evenly throughout.

We’ll talk more about branding in the weeks to come!