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Billy Joel, a musician popular in the early 1980s, has a lyric in his song “You May Right”, where he sings “I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone”...”which only proves that I’m insane”. I only share this because it is such stark contrast to what the neighborhood is today.
Bed-Stuy is one of the many neighborhoods in New York City where African-American culture has played a central role in its formation, and hopefully, its evolution. Typically, gentrification displaces the long-time residents. However, Bed-Stuy experienced less displacement than other areas in Brooklyn.
Bed-Stuy offers a lot of choice for those who explore it and live there. It defies stereotypes. There are indie stores to Southern comfort restaurants. You can choose from French bistros to some of the best Carribean food in the city.
For business in Bed-Stuy, the challenge is standing out in such a crowded and complex mix.
In a gentrified neighborhood, your challenge isn’t so much in targeting as it is in standing out. A stunning web design will definitely help you get your message out.
Being online is a necessity for any business large or small. Otherwise, you will lose out on a large and growing market segment. Local digital marketing is the key to standing out, especially for local businesses, who don’t have the budget to compete with national brands.
If you want to increase your business chances of being successful, it is worth the investment in time to learn how local digital marketing can help.
“Near me”, these are the most important terms in local search and digital presence. Those two simple words can mean so much in terms of traffic. In fact, interest in those two paltry words has quadrupled in the past 5 years of google searches.
Besides those two brief words, I would like to add the element of time. Potential customers that are looking to fill a need immediately or within 24 hours.
According to Google, near me now has almost doubled in the past two years. They also report a nearly tenfold increase in the growth of mobile searches for ‘near me today/tonight’. Finally, Google cited a two-fold increase in ‘near me open now’.
These factors go into why local digital marketing is critical for small businesses. You have increasing demand for local results that can satisfy the local customer’s needs in a very narrow window of time. If your online presence is weak, that demand is likely going to your competition.
According to a study by GE Capital, 81% of shoppers research their product online before purchasing. This is up two points, from 79%, versus last year. You will want to make sure that you can be found when customers are looking for solutions. If your business is not visible, then you missed the sale.
According to a study by Google,
“People rely on their phones to help make the best decisions at the moment of purchase. In fact, 70% of smartphone owners who bought something in a store first turned to their devices for information relevant to that purchase. And when people search on mobile, it leads to action: 92% of those who searched on their phone made a related purchase.”
Therefore, having a strong local presence is key to attracting a target audience willing to buy.
The case for local digital marketing is solid.
According to Best Designs, original graphics are the most successful.
“Original graphics make up 40% of all successful visual content that accomplishes marketing goals, but 43% of marketers struggle with the consistent production of captivating visuals.”
Since we are communicating one message, the artwork that supports it must work very hard to support the message. This is where local market know-how can really help. Original photos and images of your business in Bedford-Stuyvesant interacting with your neighborhood can add value.
It also helps with when your calls to action focus on local events in and around Bedford-Stuyvesant or at your business location.
Every email, no matter how trivial, should have a call to action. This is where all the hard work above pays off. If we omit one, we just wasted resources that could have been spent more cost effectively.
We cover email list building in great detail in our post on small business email marketing. Again, we will just hit the highlights here as it pertains to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Every neighborhood has summer fairs. While these were severely impacted by COVID, in our post COVID world they should roar back with a vengeance. It would be smart to see if you could piggy-back off one or more of them.
Incentives, deals, free trials, and samples are all great options when developing your calls to action. See if you can partner with your neighbors to create a shared promotion. This way one shopper in Bedford-Stuyvesant has two or more places to visit while out in the neighborhood.
In a gentrified neighborhood, your challenge isn’t so much in targeting as it is in standing out. Local digital marketing can help you get your message out.
When using digital marketing, it is always good to start with the low cost items first. This way you can start to build your business organically before you have to spend a significant amount of money.
SEO can sometimes feel like rolling a boulder up a hill. It is a very time consuming and effort-intensive activity. However, there are a few methods, when applied consistently and well, can yield results.
Bots are programs that crawl the web and evaluate content. It’s important to know that they care about three things.
While the steps are simple, the algorithm is complex and constantly changing. Rather than trying to outsmart the bot, it is better to give them what they want.
For more details on search theory and how to feed bots, you can read my guest post on Business2Community.
When building a Local SEO strategy, the first step is to develop a keyword strategy. This is a more complicated process, but I will briefly cover the main steps.
It is important to consider how your customer might search for you. If you have Google Analytics or Google Search Console enabled, you can see which queries are driving people already.
If not, start by building a list of logical questions your customers might ask, then go to Google Keyword Planner and see how they rank. We use a paid tool, but your results should look similar to this.
Next, you will want to add the term ‘near me’ or ‘in _____ ‘ to the highest ranking terms, and see how they do.
As a general rule of thumb, you want to select those words where the volume is highest and keyword difficulty is lowest.
For most local businesses, it will be difficult to rank well for keywords with monthly search volumes about 1,000. Therefore, we recommend focusing on those between 100-1,000 when you are starting out.
Here is more information If you wish to delve keyword planning in greater detail.
Many businesses make the mistake of not investing the time and effort in linking a given keyword to a given page. The primary reason to do this is to send a clear signal to the bot on where you would like this page to be indexed.
The second reason is to avoid having two of your own pages competing against each other for the same keyword. This is called keyword cannibalization, which tends to dilute your effectiveness.
It’s important to remember that both you and Google share the same goal, a satisfied searcher. If a visitor to your site doesn’t find the content useful, they will leave. That’s not a good experience for you or for Google.
GMB is a free platform that all businesses can access. You will also want to capture your free listing on Bing Places and Apple Maps.
The reason that I call out GMB is that nearly 8 out of every ten searches in the US are on Google. Therefore, the majority of your search traffic is likely to come from Google.
As you can see from this example of a search of “restaurants near me”, there are a set of three businesses that are given special prominence.
This is typically called the Google 3 pack. These businesses were the topic 3 restaurants ranking locally at the time of my search. These will vary on time of day, my personal search history, etc. If you click on one of these businesses, you will be taken to their GMB page.
The key takeaway from this discussion is that if you do your local SEO well, claim or create your SMB page, you can go far with the only cost being your time.
GMB is a free resource that is easily accessible to any business owner. The process is simple. If you would like more information, you can read the GMB FAQ page for a more step by step guide.
Each area has its own set of local pages, typically local news sites, that can help you with your local SEO.
One of the key signals for Google is a consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP). A consistent NAP is a clear signal to Google that your business is legitimate. The more signals that you have, the better you will perform in local search.
Local listings used to be nearly always free. However, in the past several years, this has shifted. I call this the great monetization. While you can still gain a number of listings for free, it is becoming increasingly difficult. For some of the best listings, you may have to bite the bullet and pay their listing fee.
You can successfully leverage digital marketing in [location], quite successfully at a reasonable cost if you remember these three things.
If you need help with local digital marketing for your business, please do not hesitate to contact us.
If you're thinking about finding help in Bed-Stuy for your small business, here are the things to keep in mind.
Aside from all the general tips above, here are some specific actions you can take based on the three key elements of local search algorithms:
All of this assumes that you have completed your keyword research and developed your keyword list. If you have not, this section will be more effective once you do. Please see our previous post on digital marketing in Bedford-Stuyvesant and then come back.
Go through your keywords list and select those which are good descriptors of your business. If it were me, I would use something like “digital marketing agency”, “seo services”, for example. Then make a list of the regions/towns you service, for example “seo services stuyvesant heights”.
Now comes the harder part, that is frankly a bit tedious. For each combination, see if you can create a somewhat unique post that’s 500-1000 words for that keyword. For us, it is a post like this. I try to write a post that helps my potential clients learn something or do something they didn’t know they could.
Now, this is the good part. If you do write quality posts for these keywords, you will be raising your prominence. Google knows that all these neighborhoods are in Bed-Stuy. So, for each good post you write, you help raise your prominence on a given topic in a given location.
Prominence is also helped by the basic techniques I mentioned earlier, such as being a part of local business groups. Please see the Bed-Stuy Community Organizations or Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce for listings that might pertain to you. Any local listing helps.
This is why I like the blog technique because it hits all three key areas. If your keyword is a descriptor of what you do and the neighborhood is one you serve, it is highly that you will score points on relevance.
Finding the right SEO for your small business in a neighborhood like Bedford-Stuyvesant can be a crucial way to get your company noticed online.
The same tips would apply if you were wanted to go more broadly, for example, the city level with Local SEO NYC
See more about Small Business Marketing in Bedford-Stuyvesant. If you are more interest in the borough, you can see our Small Business Marketing in Brooklyn. If you want the full city, you can see our Small Business Marketing in NYC.