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Few in Manhattan realize that from Exchange Place to Newport there is over 13 million square feet a prime office space, known as Wall Street West.
Jersey City is the second largest city in New Jersey after Newark, and about a third of all its job base is in the financial services sector. Many who left FiDi after 9/11. The number of large brands in Jersey City such as Forbes and Fidelity Investments, for example.
All those high paying jobs have transformed Jersey City. It now faces many of the same marketing challenges of the other gentrified neighborhood. How to stand out and be trendy enough so people take notice
With so much choice packed into such a small area, the key to success in Jersey City is standing out and being noticed. A fast, intuitive, and responsive web design can help you stand out.
It is important for any local business to engage in local digital marketing. Digital marketing has grown from a method of attracting more business to a means to attract and not to lose business to competition.
Some businesses think that they only need digital advertising if their business is large or is more regional or national in scope. It is a mistake that puts them at a competitive disadvantage. They are at a disadvantage because roughly 8 of 10 customers search before they buy.
A brand that is not part of that search is not likely to be considered, even if they are the best solution or product. Potential customers simply are not aware they exist.
More importantly, customers want to find solutions that are near to where they are. No one wants to travel out of their way to get what they need. The search term “_____ near me” has quadrupled over the past 5 years in google searches.
Another interesting trend that builds on the one above is that your target audience are not only looking for solutions near them but also available now.
The search term “_____ near me now” has tripled in the past 5 years. So, if you are a local bakery that sells cakes and offers discounts late in the day, being visible during a search at 3 pm for “cakes near me now” would be valuable. Plus, you can also sweeten the offer by making sure your discount is clearly visible online to potential local customers.
This builds on my prior points. If someone is searching for “cakes near me now” is probably looking to purchase one. In fact, Google reported in one of their studies that 90% of mobile searchers made a purchase.
Therefore, a local business, I would argue, is in the best position to meet that searcher's needs because they have a local market solution to their problem and are available now. The only thing left is to ensure that that search is aware that the business exists.
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 Kipps Bay interacting with your neighborhood can add value.
It also helps with when your calls to action focus on local events in and around Jersey City 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 Jersey City. 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 Jersey City has two or more places to visit while out in the neighborhood.
With so much choice packed into such a small area, the key to success in Jersey City is standing out and being noticed. Local digital marketing can help you do just that.
There are several ways to use targeted local digital marketing to win in [location]. We cannot cover them all here, but we can review some of the most common.
A superior mobile experience is based on the fundamental elements of good graphic design principles. By following good graphic design principles can make your site easy to read, navigate, and understand.
The first element is the grid layout. The most common grid patterns used in web design are Manuscript, Column and Hierarchical.
Before the days of responsive sites, hierarchical web design was in vogue. However, owing to the need to create seamless experiences between different devices, the trend has shifted to the column design.
The column design is a layout divided into a fixed number of columns. The columns set the scale for the page. The row sizes set the grid dimensions. Using a grid pattern helps maintain legibility and proportionality much simpler.
The next major element is color. There has been a lot of study on colors and their effects on moods. Much of the data has been inconclusive and highly sensitive to surroundings and context.
Luckily, we do not have to cover all these details in order to build a great design. Adobe has a very useful tool that can help you find the right mix of colors that work well together.
Font type is more an aesthetic choice. However, font size should be greater than 12 points to ensure legibility.
Lastly, we have images. Original graphics tend to be much more successful than stock images. Sites with original graphics tend to perform better than those without.
Nearly 80% of all users said the most important function of a website is to make it “Easy to Find What I Want”. This was almost 8x as important as the next items.
Since mobile searchers are 90% likely to purchase something relevant to their search. You need to be found in mobile and local search.
The best way to do that is to set up or claim your GMB page. Nearly 8 out of every 10 searches in the US are done on Google. Therefore, it makes logical sense to use their default platform. As this example shows, a mobile search of “restaurants near me” yielded this search engine results page (SERP).
You quickly notice the block with the map. This is called the Google Local 3 pack.
Google automatically returns the top 3 ranked businesses, which are restaurants in this example. If you click on one of these businesses, you will automatically be shown its GMB page.
GMB is a free resource that is easily accessible to any business owner. The process is relatively easy, and if you would like more information, you can read the GMB FAQ page for a more step by step guide.
Finally, we come to local listings. One time in the not so distant past, these listings used to be free. However, now, there are listing aggregators that charge a fee. You can still get pretty far using the free listings, however it is a very time consuming and labor intensive process.
The reason we care about local listings is that consistency in NAP (name, address, phone) is a key legitimacy signal for Google. If you want one of those coveted local 3 pack spots, you will want to send as many of these signals as possible.
Other places to look are your local digital news sources, reviews, chambers of commerce listings, local awards, e.g. Top 10 Restaurants in _____. All of these listings add credibility and further enhance your legitimacy ranking.
I hope that we convinced you why local digital marketing is important no matter the size of your business. In order to be successful in using digital marketing to help your business, we hope that you keep these three things in mind:
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 Jersey City for your small business, here are some 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 Jersey City 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 neighborhoods you service, for example “seo services Exchange Place”.
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 locations are in or near Jersey CIty. 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 NJ State Library or Hudson County 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 likely that you will score points on relevance.
Finding the right SEO for your small business in a neighborhood like Jersey City 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 state level with Local SEO New Jersey
If you are interested in what more we do, you can see our Small Business Marketing in Jersey City. If you want the full state, you can see our Small Business Marketing in NJ.