In the world of local search, marketers are facing new challenges and opportunities. Consumers are now seeking personalized experiences and relevant conversations across all touchpoints, which means that businesses must adapt their strategies to meet these changing demands. This article explores the key trends and tactics that marketers should focus on in local search for 2024.
One of the biggest challenges for businesses is providing a personalized experience across all channels and touchpoints. With the upcoming disappearance of cookies, this challenge becomes even more significant. To overcome this, businesses should consider integrating various disjointed systems to centralize customer data as their golden currency.
The article highlights the top five areas that location-based businesses should focus on in 2024. The first area is discovery, which involves being discovered for brand and location-based queries. This can be achieved by creating comprehensive listings on Google Business Profile and other authoritative channels, using proper schema structure on your website, and publishing relevant and engaging content.
The second area is relevancy and authority. It is important for brands to create helpful content that offers expert opinions and delivers value to consumers. Developing a strong content strategy involves identifying gaps in your content and meeting consumer expectations. Reviews also play a crucial role in building authority for brands.
Providing a connected experience is the third area that marketers should focus on. Consistent information across all platforms, proper site architecture, localized experiences, and personalization are key elements of a connected experience.
The fourth area is engagement. Customer engagement is an important signal for search engines, and strategies such as engaging with influencers, adding interactive videos, and developing a robust social channel strategy can help increase brand engagement.
The final area is conversion. Maximizing conversions is the ultimate goal for marketers, and strategies such as paid marketing, audience segmentation and personalization, co-optimization of paid and organic efforts, and business intelligence and analytics can help achieve this goal.
As search evolves, traditional SEO metrics become less relevant. Marketers should start adopting new metrics to measure success, such as rich results and impressions, phone calls and appointments, and time on site and conversions.
In conclusion, local search is no longer just about listings management. Marketers must create a well-integrated strategy that covers all audience touchpoints and optimizes for discovery, relevancy, experience, engagement, and conversions. Centralizing information and data will be crucial for multi-location brands to drive consistency and track performance across channels. By staying on top of these key trends and tactics, marketers can navigate the evolving landscape of local search in 2024 and beyond.
