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When I think of Allentown, I’m often reminded of a song from Billy Joel from my childhood: “Living Here in Allentown”. It pictured the plight of the many of my parent’s generation who lived through the deindustrialization of the economy that hit Allentown as well as where I grew up, Pittsburgh.
Like Pittsburgh, the Allentown of today is much different than the Allentown of the late 20th Century. Allentown is experiencing a revival based on health care, transportation, and some high tech.
Bridgeworks, supported by the Allentown Economic Development Corporation, has played a role in this transition by helping support start-ups and new ventures with incubator support. Lehigh University has also played an integral role in helping fuel Bridgeworks with new ideas.
There has been a lot of new development in the downtown area and around the Lehigh river, which was spurred by state funding. Allentown is gentrifying, and like all other post industrial gentrifying regions, businesses face a unique challenge of choosing between the old and new or trying to support both.
The marketing challenges in Allentown are more about differentiation and awareness. An amazing website, when used effectively, can help either one.
Without it, it would be more challenging to find your business online. Less than 10% of the local pack results would have landed on the first page of the search engine results page. 80% of any search volume goes to the first page results. 71% to the top 5. Without local SEO, you are unlikely to make the cut. For any small business, local SEO should be part of your overall SEO strategy and SEO campaigns.
Local SEO helps to level the playing field somewhat so small businesses can have the opportunity to be visible when people are near their location and searching for products or services that are relevant to their business. To make the most of this opportunity, you will want to make sure your website is fast.
Speed should be a key output of any high-quality, full service, website design and development process. With a fast site and a 3 pack listing, website traffic will increase dramatically.
This is an example of the 3 pack for the search "Italian Restaurants Near Me"
Local search algorithms work on what I like to call the “biggest hill in Kansas” principle. This means the local landscape sets the bar by which you will be measured. Typically, the smaller you make the reference field or more narrow you make the topic, the more likely you rise to the top.
There are exceptions, like in the New York metro area. Here, it is more akin to the biggest hill in the Himalayas.
It is a bit of an art and a science to find the right balance between scope, geography, and search volume. If the region is too small, there is likely no one searching for it. The same is true regarding the topic.
Here are the three things that you need to consider with local SEO for your business website.
For proximity, it depends on how crowded the neighborhood is. A mile in Manhattan, NY is much different than a mile in Manhattan, KS.
For prominence, again this is a competitive metric. The more crowded your location is, the more difficult it will be. Local reviews and ratings can help. You can encourage your customers to leave you reviews through social media marketing and other outreach tactics.
Finally, on relevance, this is no different for normal SEO except you are ranked versus your peers. If you are in a room filled with Einstein clones, it will be hard to pick out the smartest.
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 Allentown interacting with your neighborhood can add value.
It also helps with when your calls to action focus on local events in and around Allentown 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 Allentown. 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 Allentown has two or more places to visit while out in the neighborhood.
The marketing challenges in Allentown are more about differentiation and awareness. Local digital marketing, when used effectively, can help either one.
If you want to take full advantage of Google 3 pack to drive more traffic to your website, then the time spent optimizing your business's content and site is worth the effort for a small business owner. These are some basic off-page tips that can help:
In other words, build your SEO around the places where your local community is active.
If you aren’t afraid of a bit of simple coding, there are a couple of technical SEO tips that can help make the bot’s job easier by making some adjustments to your meta tags (title, heading, etc.) and header or body text. If this seems too complicated, any good SEO agency, SEO company, or SEO expert can help.
Structured data in this context provides a way to present useful information to bots. Schema is a standard way of using structured data across the digital landscape. To use a simple metaphor, structured data is like a form, and schema is the template that helps put the right information in the right place.
To use schema code, you need to be able to access either the header section or the body section of your web page. Generally, the schema text is put in the header, but I’ve found this can slow page speed. I cheat and put it right after the <body> header. It works equally well.
If you don't know where these are, you may want to skip this section or consider hiring an SEO expert or SEO company.
There are a number of technical adjustments you can make to help bots better scan your page. In this post, we will focus only on how to help the bot to associate the right location with your business online.
This is the code that you need to insert to ensure that you pages are tagged properly for your physical location. I’ll highlight the important part you will need to add in on your own. If you want to skip ahead, I find the Merkle schema tool to be very helpful.
If you need help with local SEO for your business, please see our eBook Easy, Simple Guide to SEO.
If you're thinking about finding help in Allentown 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 Allentown 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 Lehigh Valley”.
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 or near Allentown. 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, e.g. the Allentown Economic Development Corporation or Lehigh University. 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 Allentown can be a crucial way to get your company noticed online.
See more about Small Business Marketing in Allentown. If you live closer to Philadelphia, you can see our Small Business Marketing in Philadelphia. If you live closer to New Jersey, you can see our Small Business Marketing in New Jersey.
