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12 Tips for Small Businesses to Build a Brand Identity in Kolkata

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12 Tips for Small Businesses to Build a Brand Identity in Kolkata

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It’s often believed that branding is limited to large-scale businesses. However, in today’s world of keen competition, building a brand is important for any business, whether large or small, to flourish and keep the revenues flowing in.

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It's often believed that branding is limited to large-scale businesses. However, in today's world of keen competition, building a brand is important for any business, whether large or small, to flourish and keep the revenues flowing in.

With all big names to compete with, how can small and local businesses attain brand recognition?
Well, branding for small businesses differs from branding for big businesses.
Though small businesses may need to compete with big brands, what many small businesses get it wrong is they compete with the big names on their platform. For instance, trying to equal a big brand on selection or price poses an immediate disadvantage to a small business.

Small businesses should rather compete on their strengths and turf. Small and local businesses are valued by consumers for quality work, trustworthiness, and personalized service. Branding for small businesses should focus on these areas.

Nevertheless, the greatest asset of a small business is its location. Being a part of the community, a small business is able to understand the culture and dynamics of local consumers and can become "one of them". This is indeed an asset small and local businesses should leverage.

Local businesses are trendy and their appeal to consumers is gradually increasing. 82% consumers have reported that they have shopped from local businesses in the past few years, and almost all of them (98%) would continue to shop or increase shopping locally in the years to come. It's smart to brand locally; it enhances your online visibility, raises your profile, and eventually heightens your bottom line.

If you are a small business based in Kolkata, and want to build your brand, grow your reputation, and increase your search ranking locally, following are some effective tips to help you do so. Read on...

1. Engage in Person and Online with your Community

Amy Cuddy, a Harvard social psychologist, states that when people meet a person, they develop two main impressions about the person - firstly, people decide if they can trust that person; secondly if they can respect that person.

Well, people make the same evaluations about small businesses and their brands. To prove that you are likeable, personal, trustworthy, and active, you need to engage and communicate with your audience, thereby increasing your familiarity to them.

With the popularity of social media increasing steadily among consumers, it's a great medium for branding. Engage with your audience on social media to build brand awareness. This would result in social media activity like check-ins, followers, fans, and likes. The volume of social media activity serves as a brand signal for Google indicating that your business and products/services are liked by consumers, and your products/services are a likely match for people looking for similar products/services.

Ensure that engagement is frequent and regular. It need not be long; in most cases, simple and short works best. It's better to split your longer posts into shorter pieces and break up the content into a number of posts.

2. Let Consumers Share Something

Consumers love sharing their unique experiences and moments. Getting treated specially, receiving pleasant and unexpected surprises - all such things trigger positive responses from consumers. Try offering them ad hoc discounts or an extra cake piece. A shout-out through a post or picture or a personal note, are all free but amazing ways to make someone smile. Such moments inspire people to share, whether through a like, comment, post or review, and Google takes a notice of it.

It's also effective to involve in the community that is outside your shop. Sponsoring or participating in local events suggests that you belong to the community. It would also provide you content for sharing that is likely to facilitate consumer interaction online or chatter from the local media outlets.

Reviews represent your reputation. In the present times, consumers project their impression of you and your brand through different review outlets. A recent survey by Moz shows that the decisions of around 67% of consumers are impacted by reviews.

The quantity of reviews is an important signal to Google indicating your business's popularity amongst independent, third-party consumers. A large number of consumers leave a review when asked. So, ask your customers for reviews not only on Yelp, but TripAdvisor, Google, Yellow Pages, and other directory listings also.

Bad reviews matter too, both to search engines and public perception. The inevitable bad reviews should be managed individually and it should be realized that number of good reviews would counter the effect of the bad ones.

4. Target the Local Publications of Kolkata

Who's talking about your business and brand are important. Getting a world-renowned magazine, website or other sources to link to your website or mention you would indeed be a big deal; however, local sources are even better for you considering your purpose. Why? Because local community magazines and news sources are the places people most often go to for getting local information. Hence, when your site is linked to or your business is written about by a local news source or magazine of Kolkata, it builds brand recognition for you through the audiences of those publishers.

All major cities have local publications, and when your business is mentioned, linked or listed in them, Bing and Google would reward you with an increase in your local search ranking.

5. Target the Smaller Hyperlocal Publications of Kolkata Too

Being mentioned or linked to by the hyperlocal publications can prove that your business is truly local. There are several publishers serving specific communities, such as communities residing in a particular area of the city, or the ones speaking a particular language. There are other hyperlocal sources that publish hyperlocal content like current events in a specific area, restaurant and store openings, road construction etc. Your small business can get valuable citations and links from these hyperlocal sources.

6. Use Lingo Showing you're Local

In every locality, certain districts, streets, or areas have nicknames. Use these nicknames when describing your location. Additionally, use local landmarks. This suggests that you know the locality and are a part of it.

Celebrate the culture and local events of the area in which your business operates. Consider offering special offers or discounts during local festivals or occasions. Local sports teams - of a high school, college or a pro - often have large fan followings. Conducting events surrounding games depicts your local roots.

7. Leverage Content to Showcase your Expertise

The second prong of Amy Cuddy for creating an impression is - whether people could respect a person. This, in other words, means whether the person has adequate competence or expertise. Small and local businesses are expected to offer better customer service and high-quality services or products. So, you need to demonstrate your ability.

Publishing content that's not sales-based, but is related to your business niche and is educational, would demonstrate that you know your business. It would also provide confidence to consumers that it's right to make the purchase. You can publish blogs and send out email newsletters offering useful information and helpful tips related to your business vertical. This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise.

Once you get consumers' confidence, you would get higher clicks to call, greater click-through rates from searches, and other online activities that can be captured as customer engagement with your local business.

8. Concentrate on Branding, and Not on Conversions through Ad Impressions

Ad measurement 'impressions' usually has a bad reputation in the world of digital marketing. Right from small and medium businesses to the big brands - all are critical of its ambiguous reach, transparency, and pricing structure.

This criticism arises from the lack of measurable ROI generated by impressions in comparison to calls, clicks, and the question of whether an ad is truly viewable. To assure 'viewability', it's necessary to redefine what comprises a viewable impression, which includes, among other factors, requiring the time given to an ad to be a minimum standard of 1 second.

However, it was found by MIT researchers that human brain has the ability to process an entire image in just 13 milliseconds, which is 0.013 of a second. This implies the human brain is capable of processing 77 images every second. Hence, a viewer can process even an ad's very brief view. While the viewer may not always take an action, there is value in building familiarity of the viewer with an image, or the brand.

9. Borrow Some Prominence from National Brands through Co-Op Programs

Co-op programs offer compensation to local retailers when they display national brands in their advertisements. For instance, if local tire dealers display logos of Bridgestone, Michelin, and Goodyear in their own marketing, they, in return, receive payouts for brand exposure. Nevertheless, the benefits of co-op programs to you, as a local business, extend beyond financial subsidies. National companies make heavy investments in their branding, and when a local business is affiliated with a national brand, the local business's reputation gets a boost.

From SEO perspective, brand names have authority with the search algorithms. The brand names would help correlate your local business to the business niche those national companies are associated with.

10. Sponsor Local Charities

Sponsoring local charities is not only an effective way to get your local business name out; it also indicates that your business works for causes within the community. When sponsoring a charity, request the organizers to mention the name of your small business on their social media pages, website, printed materials, t-shirts or signage. This would raise your business or brand name recognition locally.

Take the use of hashtags on social media a step further by using a custom hashtag. Using a custom hashtag would boost your brand recognition in the local market. Use it when posting on different social media channels, especially on the visual platforms like Instagram. Such a strategy helps your target customers associate the hashtag with your business, increasing the likelihood of name recognition.

12. Flaunt your Business Name

Make your business known to the world...especially to your locality! Increase your business name recognition by posting the name of your business anywhere you can. You can list your business name on your personal Facebook profile under the section of employment. Create a page for your local business on Linkedin. If you post at industry or community forums, include the name of your business in your bio. People on these platforms might not be aware that you are the owner of a business, and they might seek the services you provide. You might even get your next customer from these platforms!

Use pens that have the name of your business on them and carry extras when going out. When making new personal connections, hand them out your business card that has your contact number.

Summing Up

There are two challenges involved in marketing - the first one is being found and the second one is being chosen.

Google's search algorithm considers the brand to be an important factor. Local businesses can boost their chances of being found by promoting their brands in their community, where it matters the most.

Increasing brand recognition helps with the second challenge of being chosen too - when the search results feature your local business and your business name is recognized. If your brand name happens to be on top of the minds of your audience and they enter it as a search term partially or in whole, that's even better. Hence, brand building should be a part of all your marketing campaigns and strategies. And the winning tips mentioned in this post would greatly help you build a solid local brand in Kolkata.

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12 Insanely Powerful Tips for SMBs to Create a Brand Identity in Kolkata

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It's often believed that branding is limited to large-scale businesses. However, in today's world of keen competition, building a brand is important for any business, whether large or small, to flourish and keep the revenues flowing in. With all big names to compete with, how can small and local businesses attain brand recognition?

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20 Winning Local SEO Tips to Rank Higher in Kolkata

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20 Winning Local SEO Tips to Rank Higher in Kolkata

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A high ranking in local search has a crucial role to play in the success of any business, whether a local business or a global brand. It boosts the visibility of your business among local searchers, which enhances your chances of drawing more local traffic. However, it’s quite tricky to optimize your site for local search, and your efforts might not be successful if it’s not done right.

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A high ranking in local search has a crucial role to play in the success of any business, whether a local business or a global brand. It boosts the visibility of your business among local searchers, which enhances your chances of drawing more local traffic. However, it's quite tricky to optimize your site for local search, and your efforts might not be successful if it's not done right.

The Relevance of Local SEO

In today's digital times, we are increasingly looking for specific solutions and answers that hold relevance in certain situations. Google responds to our searches by showing us local search results. Two conclusions can be drawn from this:

Local SEO is incredibly essential for local businesses.

Your business's mobile website is strongly connected to local searches.

It should be noted that consumers that do local searches are action-oriented since they need a shop quickly in the area. Local consumers taking action online are more willing to make the purchase, converting more. So, online marketers and entrepreneurs should focus more on local SEO to boost their local search ranking.

Before delving into how to optimize your website to boost its local ranking in Kolkata, let's first understand the factors that influence your local ranking.

4 Factors Influencing Local Ranking of a Website

Local SEO has its challenges; nevertheless, there are ways that can help you improve your local search ranking. This starts with understanding all the key factors affecting your ranking. As per a report by Moz, following are the top factors influencing local search ranking:

Similar to regular SEO, you need to build a sound link profile for local SEO. The quantity and quality of your inbound links have a vital role to play in your site's local search ranking. Focus on building high-quality local links, and take the help of reputed local publications and websites for this.

The relevance, quality, and quantity of keywords you use also influence your local ranking. It's important to use a relevant and high-ranking keyword, and use the name of your target location as the main keyword. Then, distribute this keyword throughout the content, like meta descriptions, meta titles, H1s, H2s, etc.

Make sure you update your business information completely and accurately on GMB (Google My Business).

Hence, details such as state, city, categories, and proximity play a major role when it comes to ranking well in the search results of a user.

Social presence of a business plays a crucial role in its local search ranking. A high rate of engagement and a large following can boost your social presence, thereby improving your local ranking. Acquire more followers through engagement with influential people on social media. Moreover, generate content that's highly engaging and interesting.

Besides these factors, there are others too that can influence the local search ranking of your business. The other factors include Domain Authority, anchor text quality, review signals and more. Understanding these factors well and trying to improve them will help boost your local ranking.

Tips to Improve your Business's Local Search Visibility

Now, let's look at what you can do to improve the local SEO of your business in Kolkata, thereby increasing its local ranking.

1. Insert Keywords in Multiple Listings

In local SEO, it's important to get brand visibility through multiple local listings. Add your local keywords in unique descriptions across various listings. Ensure that you include current photos and your business category. After a list is compiled, promote it. Reviews are important to improve your ranking as well as for encouraging visitors to take action.

2. Attain Local Coverage

An effective technique of improving your SEO is appearing in prominent publications as Google indexes them quite high. For improving your local SEO, try getting coverage by the top local publications. Build and strengthen relationships with prominent local journalists to get your news covered by them on a constant basis. Once you attain that coverage, you'll see substantial improvement in your local SEO brought by these links.

3. Improve your Internal Linking Structure

The website architecture of most local businesses is not sound enough, often with the important pages being linked to only from the footer or main navigation. Wherever relevant, add internal links from within the content of your pages, including chief service pages, informational pages, and blog posts. Improving the internal linking structure of website results in boost in rankings, both organic and maps.

4. Get High-Quality, New Links

The quality as well as the number of links that are directed to your site significantly impacts its local search ranking. To get quality links, consider publishing an article online, giving a presentation at a local college to business students, or leading a discussion at meetings of regional business organizations. Ask the associated organizations to link to your business website.

To improve the local ranking of specific pages, optimize the title tags with a local keyword. An example of a title tag can be - restaurant in Kolkata. This title tag signals search engines that the corresponding page is related directly to Kolkata. This page is more likely to appear in searches carried out from your geographic region as well as searches explicitly done for this local term.

6. Claim your GMB Profile and Optimize it

A simple way of improving local SEO is to claim your GMB (Google My Business) profile. Your GMB profile is a business listing which appears for local searches. To claim or set up a listing, your business should have a street address and a physical location. Optimize this profile with business hours, images, contact information, and category, to improve your local search considerably.

7. Make Local Business Profiles

Build your presence on your industry's prominent review sites, such as Yellow Pages, Just Dial, Four Square, Hotfrog, Indiamart and other business listing sites in India. Every local profile created by you serves as another "platform" where local visitors land on. This is an amazing opportunity that lets you establish social proof and better your local SEO, which in turn, would drive visitors back to your site.

8. Tie your Business with a Geographic Area

Tie your business with the area you operate in by starting with Google Maps and finishing with local listings, citations, and your website. Without being spammy, convey to the search engines which area your business wants to dominate, as well as your full-service area. The job may not be simple, but would certainly work.

9. If you're a Multi-Local Brand, Create Hyper-Localized Content

If you're a multi-local brand, lay emphasis on generating hyper-local content. For many businesses, the location page content is same for all locations. Avoid this and create unique content for every location page. Instead of merely replacing the city name in the pages, conduct some research and generate content that's engaging, relevant, and useful for every location's neighborhood.

Be completely authentic when you list your company on sites like Yelp, Bing, or Google. Fill in your business description and update regularly. Upload high-quality and current photos. Also, keep in mind that photographs that seem to be photoshopped can affect your SEO ranking adversely. When you find someone reviewing your business, whether negatively or positively, always respond with a proper, constructive feedback.

Small details are often overlooked while uploading an image or posting a blog; nevertheless, avoiding this makes all the difference. HTML elements like titles, meta description tags, and alt tags are as important as the content or image. These details appear in the search results, and so make sure the verbiage is relevant and concise to your local market.

12. Provide Google Virtual Tour

Google Virtual Tour is a new tool related to local SEO for businesses. Now you can include your business's 3D photographic tour to its Google profile, which would appear when your business is searched on Google Maps. Search results that have photos have more chances of drawing interest. Moreover, the search algorithms of Google provide preferential treatment to profiles that have included this feature.

13. Focus on Reputation Management

Be proactive about your business's online reputation management for improving your local SEO. You can use various tools to proactively garner, manage, and track reviews; however, your focus should be the reviews on your GMB page. Good reviews enhance your business visibility.

14. Manage Citations Efficiently

After claiming the Bing Places, Yelp, Google My Business, and other listings, business owners should claim their business with major Indian business directories like Just Dial, Indiamart, Sulekha, HotFrog and Express Business Directory. Ensure that your name, address and phone number (NAP) are correct. These serve as the chief data providers for a major section of business information available online. In case these data providers don't have accurate information about your business, the incorrect information may reach other citations.

15. If you're a B2B Marketer, Address Customer Needs

Most of the B2B buyers don't search your service, product or brand. Such buyers use search phrases which are need- or problem-oriented. Ask your customer-facing coworkers about what are the most common information requests made or questions asked by customers. Identify about 3 to 5 chief customer pain points that your business helps to solve. Organize your content and navigation around those.

16. Optimize your Website

Use high-ranking and relevant keywords with your location names for optimizing your website content. This involves optimization of titles, URLs, image alt attributes, and meta descriptions with keywords and relevant location names.

If you wish local searchers to find your local business in Kolkata, it's necessary for them to know where your business is located. So, it makes sense to clearly mention your business name as well as its exact address on your site. This may sound like a no-brainer, but it's surprising that how many businesses don't do this. Let your address be completely local. This implies that your address should be very close to the location for which your business needs to have visibility in local search results.

18. Put your Location on Google Map

Put the location of your business on the map. Include a map in your website, on the 'Contact' page, with the help of Google Maps. This would enable visitors to instantly see the location of your business on the map. A new map can be created easily through Google My Maps.

19. Leverage Social Signals

Consider setting up automated daily social shares with the help of a Buffer subscription of $10. In case you don't have any idea for content, simply share your reviews daily - one each day - linking back to your reviews page or website. No need to use every platform for sharing, but consider using the platforms Twitter, Facebook business page, and Google+ at least.

20. Schema Up your Website

Schema.org (also known as Schema) is a semantic tag vocabulary (or microdata). Adding the schema to your HTML improves the way your page is read by search engines and represented in SERPs. If your website uses WordPress, you can follow these tutorials on schema Markup: Advanced Schema Markup and Basic Schema Markup. Irrespective of Schema, include your NAP on each of your website pages, preferably in the footer.

While global SEO is always important, local SEO cannot be underrated, for it has its own unique advantages. Research shows that 50% of consumers that carry out a local search through their mobile phone visit a shop the same day. If your local business in Kolkata doesn't have a high search engine ranking in your region, your physical store may lose out to competitors.

The local search optimization tips discussed above, when applied right, can immensely help your business rank higher locally. So, start implementing these tips today and watch your local ranking soar higher!

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20 Winning Local SEO Tips to Rank Higher in Kolkata - 1 Web Street

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A high ranking in local search has a crucial role to play in the success of any business, whether a local business or a global brand. It boosts the visibility of your business among local searchers, which enhances your chances of drawing more local traffic.