2024 the Year of Websites for Local Business:

Google as a search engine giant keeps playing Trojan horse with local brands as we marketers watch by. Local brands are constantly shifted from top benefactor as it replaces the free publicity with paid packs in Local service ads and zero click SERPs.

As a local business and top digital marketing companies in Mumbai, one tends to answer a simple question, "Do we even need a website?"

Well, the answer is ‘Yes’ and we can assure you that 2019 will be the year of website.

Let’s look at the current status of local business websites and most-needed improvements:

1. The encroachment of paid ads into local packs:

Your local business today cannot rank on top. The simple reason being some other competitor is paying the search engines for their ads to be showcased at the top of the local search. This means the relevancy and proximity are out when it comes to ranking as a faraway business can showcase themselves to a customer who is searching near to your business.

1. Search engine giant Google being a lead gen agency:

Google’s Local Service Ads program has positioned themselves as the agent between business and consumer. Simply making it difficult for local businesses to survive only if they use paid ad campaigns.

1. Your brand name SERPs doesn’t belong to you:

A user specifically searching for your brands are show cased with the Pop up of "People also search for" with the competitors name on it. Even in certain case showing ads of competitors on our brand names.

1. Google as homepage for your business:

Almost all the businesses are seeing this happen to them. Once a brand name is searched most of the basic business info, make a phone call, get directions, book something, ask a question, take a virtual tour, read microblog posts, see hours of operation, thumb through photos, see busy times, read and leave reviews is showcased to the user in Google Knowledge Graph. All this information is showcased without the user even clicking the brand’s domain.

This has all let the marketers believe that the local SERP’s have shrunk to make the user busy within the platform of Google and generate maximum revenue for them and their partners.

What makes a website strong for local business?

Every marketer and Digital marketing agency in Mumbai should know the in-depth guide for creating the best possible website as it can not only solve all your customers question but also will help to retain them in the long run.

A strong website will cover the onsite optimization and content development simultaneously. A strong modern website strategy take the following into accounts:

• The search keyword and real world research to know what the customers are exactly looking for.
• These are then reflected into the website pages including the homepage, location landing pages, about page, blog and other components.
• These desires are then to interpreted into languages comfortable for both the search engine and the user in the form of tags, headings, descriptions, text, and in some cases, markup.

All this is a single and interconnected effort of research, writing and publishing. This is far away thought from most marketer who are still into keywords stuffing on the tags and page content. What we are trying to do with the website is building authority with content resources for a particular consumer demographic in the sight of the search engines. The more easily these information is conveyed to the customers the more relevant our website becomes in the eyes of search engine.

It is necessary to know that not all keywords are revealed using tools. Research needs to be done at national level and then it can be incorporated at regional and local level reflecting the language differences and geographical terms.

Hi, I'm Sam. Founder of @GoLeadDigital. I live and breathe digital marketing. I hope you enjoy my findings.