You’ve heard all of the quotes and thoughts about having a proper foundation. It’s no less important to our foray into local digital marketing.

Turns out that creating the right foundation as a bedrock for these efforts is something that you can do without relying on (or paying) someone else. It’s also the “easiest.”

As a reminder, what we’re talking about here is not so much the folks that already know you and the great things that your business does, but those who are in the market for the products and services you offer, but don’t know much about where or how to get them.

Last time we identified three main opportunities for door and window dealers to optimize their success among local searches:

• Paid search;
• Organic search; and
• Local pack.

Success with both paid and organic searches have a few things in common:

• The best results come from leaving the heavy lifting to professionals;
• They can be expensive; and
• They require a fairly robust web presence ahead of time.

The local pack is that group of business listings (currently three) which reside just below the map, just below the paid ads (pay per click). The map has the “pins” that identify the businesses in the listing.

Some interesting stats to explain why ranking is this local pack is so important:

• These local packs appear in over 90% of Google searches with local intent;
• Consumers who are searching locally are ready to buy something now—50% of consumer smartphone users that conduct a search will “buy” within a day;
• 78% of these local mobile searches result in offline purchases; and
• Maybe the most important stat of all—more local searchers clicked in the local pack than organic and PPC results combined.

As you can see, maximizing your digital marketing efforts with the goal to be found in the local pack is the bedrock upon which all other efforts should be built.

Next time, we’ll work through how to optimize your opportunities to do so.