Whether your brand is a large entity that serves a diverse crowd throughout the world or your brand caters to a local audience, it is necessary to reach as many people through search as possible. Some brands derive large amounts of traffic through social media, direct mail and email advertising, but ultimately, every business or brand needs the ability to connect with individuals in an organic medium. Regardless of the size or focus of a brand, obtaining recognition in local communities on the web is essential for long-term success and niche market exposure. Today, we’ll review how to make connections of influence in ways that also can help build local SEO dominance.

Learn About the Target Demographic

Before you can effectively target individuals in local communities, you must first have a strong understanding of what that local community – and its influencers – looks like. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll need to figure out what exactly constitutes a local influencer. With this information in hand, it becomes fairly easy to scope out various blogs, websites and platforms in search of individuals who meet your criteria. Experience, lots of current content, media influence and a large audience are just a few of the metrics that you may choose to use when evaluating whether somebody would be an influential local connection. When pinging for SEO, you’ll want to be specific and careful about selecting influencers whose task in part will be to provide coverage and attention for your brand.

Survey Your Audience

If you already have a solid traffic base from one or more areas, then it’s a great idea to learn more from them about local influencers. Traffic comes from a variety of sources and is referred by many different entities. The people who visit your website, purchase products, subscribe for more information and otherwise provide interactions often arrive there through a series of events. In some of these cases, a local influencer may have already sent people to you. By asking your audience how they arrived or even who are important local influencers, you can retrieve more information that will be absolutely useful in your search for local influence.

Use All Available Tools

There are many different web-based solutions for finding local influencers for your brand. The most potent and familiar tool would have to be social media. Through sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you can search and browse by interest, geographic area and a variety of other options to find individuals who have influence in a given niche and in a given area. Your existing audience may already be populated with individuals in various localities who can and do influence others on the broader topics that you cover. Additionally, there are many influencer tools available online that can specifically help you connect social media, email, internet and other resources together in order to find people who may be willing to speak highly of your brand (and boost your efforts when it comes to pinging for SEO).