13 Local Marketing Strategies that work in 2026

Alright, in this video we're going to discuss 13 local marketing strategies that work. This is actually an article that I downloaded from Search Engine Journal which is a really good publication. They speak very high level on marketing topics. And so when I was going through this I was like, yeah, these are good ideas, but people probably won't know how to implement these things. So I'm going to go through each one and just talk about strategies that you can utilize to implement for local marketing in your business. So the first one is optimize for local search through Google Business profile. We made videos about this before, but really quick, when someone searches for your business, this is what your Google Business profile is. And you can optimize it on the back end. If you go to business.google.com you can go into your info section and you can add like the services that you offer, the service areas, services, locations and fill out all this stuff basically. And then there is a whole strategy on local SEO. But for the most part, as long as you fill this out and get Google reviews, that's going to be really important. And one of the reasons this is important is because when someone searches for a service that you offer in a specific area, you see that there's 5 million results. This right here, Google's only showing three options. And so that is what this means by optimizing for local SEO through your Google Business profile. So what you can do, fill out all that stuff on the back end and get Google reviews. And the number two tactic that they have here is actually get local reviews from local customers. And so one of the ways that you can do that for your Google business is on the home section here there's a little link that they give you that you can send to customers. And when you send this, it's going to automatically pull up your Google Business profile like this and then it's going to pull up a little section for them to leave you a review. So what a lot of companies do is they'll send this in like an email or text after the service or even put on in like a QR code and send it to the customers as well. And so that's a really good way to get your local, get your local reviews because as you see here, if you were to do this search in your area, you would be able to see who the top players are. So if I was trying to rank a carpet cleaning company in Frederick in this specific area, I know that I probably need to get around 60 to 70 reviews to even get an opportunity to be on here, because 17% of your ranking is your Google Reviews. All right, so number three is SEO, optimize your website. And this one's funny to me because there's no way that a local business owner is going to take the time to figure out how to SEO optimize your website. So I'm going to explain it very quickly on what you need to do. So on your website, if you go to a service page or any page, these are the things that you want to look for. There's a free plugin that we use, but you can do this manually if you wanted to. And it's called Detailed. And basically in your title tag, which is this section up here that pops up, Google uses this in their rankings. Kitchen remodeling in Gaithersburg, Maryland and nearby areas. You want to have your service, and you want to have your locations, your target location. Same with your meta description. You want to have your service and you also want to have your geo target that you want to go after. And you want to make sure you have over 750 words on the page. And the last thing is your headings. You want to make sure your H1 is designated as the service and then your target area. You can get specific, like Gaithersburg, Maryland, or you can just target, Maryland. As long as you have these keywords in there, your website is optimized for SEO, specifically local SEO. And so those are the things that we do with our clients. But again, any company can do that, and that's what they mean. SEO, optimize your website, all this keyword research and all this stuff, yes, you can do that, and yes, we do that. But for the common person, that is what you need to do. Focus on the service that you offer with the geo target, specifically create localized content. Okay, this is a simple one that you can do. It's by creating case studies. So here's an example of siding replacement in Silver Spring, Maryland. And then we basically just tell the story of this customer. How long did it take? What was the issue? The customer left a review. What was the service that we offer, all that kind of stuff. And the beauty is that you get these geo targets, but then you also get all those other filler keywords. You know, you don't want to stuff it at all with keywords. What you want to do is just tell the true story. And what this allows you to do is to create localized content specifically for your business that then you can use to share and rank on SEO. So there's no shortcuts to this, as they say. But at the end of the day, this is a very easy way to use something that's in your brain and create localized content. All right, review your website's design. So this is going to be very straightforward. Is it easy to do business with you? And there's three things that you need to do. You have to have three call to actions on your website at all times. A request for a free quote, like a contact page, a call button, or either. These two call to actions can either be a request, an appointment or estimate calculator. So they could be two different questions. But regardless you want to have two. Up here they have request a free quote and call us now. And the last one is you want to have a chat widget like this. And, and what this will allow you to do is to communicate back and forth to your customer via text. And this is a really, really good way to convert more leads for your business. So as far as aesthetically how your website looks, there are ways, obviously you can make it look better and they talk about those, but what you want to do is make sure that it's very, very simple to do business with you once they get onto your website. Alright, so the next thing we have here is integrate a CRM tool. So if you have a chat widget like this or a contact form or something else, you can pull in those people into like a service titan, house call, pro jobber, you know, whatever service fusion, service monster, there's a bunch of them. You could pull these people into a CRM tool and then that way you can, you can track them and communicate with them. If you are not pulling them in through a form like this, obviously you can just mainly add them. But it's a really good way to segment your database based on location. So if you have people that are in Michigan and you have people that are in Indiana or whatever in Detroit, in Grand Rapids, then you can target those people specifically based on the location that they're in. And so it's a really nice way to convert website leads into website visitors into actual leads. Attract local visitors through Google Ads. So this is a new thing that is coming across the country. And what Google Ads are is these Google local service ads again, when people search for a proctor service locally in your area, there's 5 million results. Google is showing these as sponsored results. And if you see these three people are competing against 50 other carpet cleaning companies to be shown in this section. So it narrows down the section that you're focusing on and the way that this works. Is if you go to ads.google.com LocalServiceAds, you can put in your target zip code, you can put in how many leads you want a month, and then you select your industry and it's going to tell you how much you pay per lead. And so this is a really good way for your local visitors to get clients through your Google Ads specifically for local content. So that is how you do that. Feed the funnel with remarketing. Okay, so inside of our Flash funnel that we operate on, customers come into your funnel and they come out the other way. And this retargeting plan right here, these are ways that you can retarget. You can retarget them through monthly newsletters, social media posting, and then text marketing. And so you want to have a monthly newsletter that goes out to people because maybe you do carpet cleaning, but maybe also you do tile and grout cleaning. And so you want to be able to say, hey, here's one of those case studies that we did this tile and grout cleaning in this specific area. And people say, oh, I didn't know that you did that. That's pretty cool. Or you can offer them specials or whatever. It's a really good way to section out your customers and then target them in other ways. Another way you could do this is let's say you're going to send a monthly newsletter out to only people in Detroit and, and you're going to tell them, hey, here's a special for Detroit or whatever. That's how the CRM, the client relationship manager, ties into your retargeting strategy. So feed the funnel with remarketing. Get the phone going with Google call only ads. So on those ads you can select that they can only call you. They can't fill out forms or anything like that. So that's a really nice way to just get calls in. A lot of the companies we work with are having a shortage of people answering the phones, so they prefer to get the forms. But you can do that CRO optimized landing pages for each campaign. So what this means is if you run an ad campaign or even are just targeting a local area, then you want to create specific optimized landing pages that target that area. So how this looks, let's say that you are targeting kitchen remodeling in Detroit. You create a specific page on your website targeting kitchen remodeling customers in Detroit. And it's very narrow, specific to that person and those people so that you'd attract them. They come to your website. It's Very narrowly optimized. Maybe there's even a review about a kitchen remodel that you did in Detroit and maybe even a case study about it and your specific process for kitchen remodeling in Detroit. This is your homepage. It's your homepage's homepage for that specific target area, as they say. All right, leverage social media. Another good way for local marketing strategies. If you're going to leverage social media, use your local markets, your local Facebook groups to market your business. So let's say there's a yard sale or a community that you're doing a carpet cleaning job in. You could go into that community and say, hey, we're going to be in your area next week. Here's a $35 off coupon for residents in this specific community or in this specific city or whatever it is. It's a really good way to get very localized, targeted content in front of people. There are so many of these Facebook groups that have really, really high engagement for like mom's Facebook groups or networking groups that if you were to post in there, you could start getting traction for local people, even down to the neighborhood. As I mentioned, video tells your homegrown story. Video is huge. If you can create a video of someone doing your services. We have clients that do this for like they do implant rug cleaning, so they have a video of their implant rug cleaning process or they do carpet cleaning and so they go out and they just explain the process for carpet cleaning. It's really good to share as an asset, whether it's in any of these channels, on your Google business profile, on your website. People love video. And so that's a really good way to do it. Offline activations and events networking groups. We're a part of one called bni, which is a really good networking group to get in front of people that can refer you business. But again, there's a bunch of events that you can do in your local community to get your name out there. And this is more the old school stuff, but it still definitely does work. So that's it. Hopefully this was educational to go through these steps and give you some actual tactical feedback that you can utilize in your business. If you have any questions, be sure to drop a comment below. We post videos about growing local service businesses using technology and digital marketing. And if this is something that you're interested in, we'd be happy to talk to you about your business and see if it might be something that we might be able to help you with specifically getting more leads and keeping those schedules full is really important for us, so be sure to hit like and subscribe. We'll see you in the next video. Hope you have a great day.