Increasing market visibility for locally delivered services

From accounting and tax services to zero residue cleaning services, some services just need to be delivered by local professionals. While these professionals are delivering for their clients, day in, day out, rain or shine, it is not always easy for them to get the visibility they need to attract new clients. Word of mouth from satisfied clients helps, but these days most potential clients are looking for services online. How then can you establish your professional or brand identity online?

As a business professional, you need a website to establish your professional or brand identity, online. You can do it yourself or hire others to build website for you. A good website can deliver a return on investment through new prospects and sales. But this ROI can only be achieved if your potential clients can find you. Internet search engines use their own, constantly changing, rules to determine the "best" website to return in response to any given query.

You can spend a lot of time, effort, and money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - ie placing the appropriate keywords on your website. SEO will not deliver the hoped-for results unless the website is considered credible by the search engines. Generally, credibility by search engines is determined by the number of links on other websites that point back to yours. Paid advertising can provide increased visibility, but often at a significant cost. It can also be difficult to target towards local geographic markets, and generally has relatively low credibility - do you trust all the claims in the advertisements that you see? A better way to increase the visibility of your website is to use public relations services that can get mentions of your services and website on more credible, third-party, news sites.

While there are multiple search engines, Google has by far the largest volume of searching activity. To establish a brand identity or professional reputation online is a competition with others also seeking to establish their reputations, often in similar niches. Local services are distinguished by a geographic area of service delivery. Searches within mapping services can be a method for local services to stand out and avoid competing with national brands within their local service area. Google provides a service - Google My Business (GMB) - that enables local service firms to control their listing within local search results. You can take a course, and control your listing yourself, or hire others to build it out for you.

Completing your GMB profile is a useful step to complement your business website. While necessary, it is not sufficient to deliver the ROI you need without other steps to build the credibility of your brand and professional identity online. This short video can show you how to take those next steps to build the online credibility your business deserves.