What Does a Local Internet Marketing Consultant Do?
If you’ve been reading up on ways to promote your small business online and have been browsing marketing tips for small business, you have probably heard that a local internet marketing consultant may be able to help your company. However, it might not be clear exactly what a local internet marketing consultant does. Understanding what these people do can help you see why hiring one might be beneficial for your company.
There are several different elements to a full-blown internet marketing campaign. An internet marketing consultant can provide you with help on all of them. Although there are actually more types of internet marketing than these, some basics are search engine optimization, email marketing, social media and social networking. If your consultant can help you with these four areas, it will quickly make a difference in how much traffic you are driving to your websites.
Search engine optimization means that your consultant will help your site to rank higher in the search engines when someone searches for terms related to your site. They will do this in two ways. First, they will help you optimize the content on your site with keywords so that the search engines know that it should be listed when people search for certain terms. Next, they will build links using anchor text and keywords from other trusted sites to help positively influence how highly Google thinks your site should be listed when they provide search engine results to searchers. As a local search specialist, a consultant needs to focus their efforts on ranking high when people are searching for physical businesses in a certain geographic region.
Email marketing is the next thing that an internet marketing consultant needs to be able to do. When consulting with internet marketing, it is critical that the consultant is able to provide the client with the means for building a strong email list. A large list is one of the key components to a successful online business. This means setting the client up with a means for collecting customer email addresses, and then with a good method of mass emailing them while staying compliant with all the applicable laws and regulations.
Social media is another area that an internet marketing consultant needs to be engaged in. With a focus on local marketing, they need to create content that is going to be posted on social media sites that is focused on brining in searchers looking for local content. This in turn will raise the general profile of your business in the online world, especially among those searching from the local area.
Social networking is another very important tool of the local internet marketing consultant. Anytime there is a local group on Facebook, or a group of local people to follow on Twitter, a consultant should make sure that a local company inserts itself into those communities. Local communities on social networking sites might be smaller than the communities at large, but news travels much faster along those channels, and will reach people that are actually qualified to come in and be a customer at a local business.
A local internet marketing consultant needs to focus all four of these types of efforts on qualified traffic. This means people that are actually in the geographic area that the business is located in, unless the business is also trying to sell product online, unless a broader approach is taken. The goal is to make sure that when someone uses an application like Google maps to search for a certain type of business that your company is near the top of the list.
Author: Cam Smith
