This page will use Dallas Texas as the example city for various ways in which local businesses can market their products and services on the Patch.com website. There are several ways in which a local business can see an increase in new customers or clients by using the features inside (and outside!) of Patch in intelligent ways.
First, let’s compare Patch with sites like Craigslist and NextDoor:
Craigslist
Service listings in Craigslist now typically require a monthly fee (roughly $5/month) for service business classified ads like HVAC, roofing, and even licensed professions like tax returns and real estate. This is different than it was in the past. However there is no targeted zip code/regional advertising other than the flat monthly fee.
Craigslist doesn’t permit reviews and it doesn’t have a “social” component to its features. You can list events for free, but you will have to pay to get exposure in other regions if your business crosses Craigslist’s regional boundaries.
NextDoor
Nextdoor has very basic free listings for businesses such as this Dallas-area business. Your business is allowed to add a logo, some pictures, hours of operation, a website link, and a small business bio. You will have to pay to get exposure outside of a small radius around your physical office/building/store location. Nextdoor users are allowed to leave reviews, but business owners have minimal option to reply to those reviews unlike Google Business Profile (Google Maps) business listings.
So Why Use Patch?
Patch, at the time of this post, is more powerful at the local level than most people realize. It has the ability to offer some nice benefits to any local business owner:
- Free to join
- You can have two listings -> one “personal” and one official “business”
- Your services can be added as “Classifieds”
- Your company’s events can be promoted locally
- Paid advertising options within Patch exist (see more here)
- The classified ad service listings, if optimized properly, can rank in Google on their own for local keywords
- You are allowed to add an image with your classified listings (not all classified ad sites permit this)
- The links inside your business profile and classified listings can help power up your main website, Google Business listing, YouTube channel and other web properties to rank higher in the search engines
- You can follow other local businesses and like/share their postings, thus raising awareness of your business once they see you engaging with their content
- Local news keeps you updated on happenings in your area
- You can post local news (not just service listings) and start to build trust in your company from other local Patch users
Combining the above, you can increase the chances of your business gaining new customers/clients and building goodwill in your local market.
Examples Of This Working
This local Dallas sports bar offers a stage with large screen, DJ booth, microphone system, and more in case a private party wants to rent the restaurant for an awards event, live music event, or even a large birthday party. Their Patch listing ranks #1, even above Maps, in Google for those seeking such a venue:
If you post an event, the links inside the description can be used for “off-page SEO link building” to help send traffic to the inner pages of your website. The goal is to use relevant, authoritative and trustworthy websites to point links to these non-home page portions of your website in order to boost those pages higher up in the search engines.
Patch is interesting in that even after the event has concluded, it keeps the original listing live. This means that the power of those links doesn’t go away once the event is finished. This listing is still live even though the event concluded a few weeks ago (from the time of this post):
Your listing on Patch even can rank well when people go the search engines and look for a wider geographic area. In this case, local training classes for “Dallas Fort Worth” are ranking #1 in the organic listings (just under the Maps listings) in Google despite the Patch listing only being posted in the “Dallas” community:
Sometimes you need to increase your company’s brand name plus the city in which you are located for increasing search engine authority that your business is a legitimate local company. Here is one such example where this was done, especially for a business with office out of the home:
Some times you may be entering a niche within a highly-competitive local market. Bathroom remodeling in Collin County is highly-competitive with the County’s overall revenue potential for quality contractors, so this niche (shower glass doors) is using Patch to begin to enter that market and start getting phone calls:
Occasionally you get a unique situation such as this driving school located on the Garland-Richardson border. The main instructor also is approved by Texas DPS to be an off-site “third party” driving test location. This is so that people won’t have to wait for weeks to take their driving tests, especially in high-population areas like Dallas and Garland.
If you are expanding into a new region, you also can use Patch to test (probe) and see if you need to invest heavily in pay-per-click for a new niche. In this case, a video production company with a Downtown Dallas address wants to enter the niche (“podcast video recording”) in a suburb of Dallas – in this case McKinney. The Patch listing ranks #1 in Google after the “Sponsored” paid ad section of the search result.
What Else Can Be Done With Patch?
In addition to ranking in the search engines and using the description of your profile & classified ad service listings for SEO link building, here are some first step suggestions:
- Engage with the local businesses and active people in your geographic area. Do this to start to build awareness and trust in your company.
- Post any open-to-the-public event that you are hosting or promoting. Using the sports bar example earlier, they should use Patch to promote the nights when they have boxing, MMA, or major professional or college sporting event watch parties.
- Test new niches and/or markets with an ad to determine if your Patch listing will rank in Google quickly (like the podcast video recording example above). If it doesn’t rank on the first two pages in the search engines after a week, then your “probe” indicated that you likely will need to invest more into SEO hard costs like link building, content creation, on-page SEO development and possibly something like a paid press release.
- Do some low-cost advertising within Patch to reach neighboring areas. Using the sports bar example again, they are located on the border of Dallas and Irving/Las Colinas. Currently they are in the “Dallas” Patch community due to their physical address, so they should consider paying to get exposure in the “Irving” Patch community for their services and/or events.
- ** An advanced technique is to consider any listing on Patch (your business profile or one of your classified service ads) which links to your website as a “Tier 1” web property. In competitive local markets you can boost both your Patch listing as well as your main website with intelligent “Tier 2” link building, CTR traffic, social sharing and other advanced off-page SEO techniques. Contact us for more details about your specific needs.
Finally, be sure to geo-tag your images with appropriate latitude/longitude, meta data in the Properties field and more to help your efforts. You likely spent time and/or money on your photos and graphic designed image files, so take a few extra steps to give each image file the best odds of helping you. Once geo-tagged you can use these image files where appropriate, such as on your Patch business profile and your individual Patch classified listings.
While Dallas Texas was used as the example in this post, the action steps mentioned are applicable to most areas of the United States. In some cases, you can reduce website costs if you only care about getting quick wins in the search engines; but please note that you can lose your rankings overnight if your Patch profile gets deleted. It always is best for you to have a fully-optimized website which you control all aspects: domain registration, website hosting, content, SEO optimization, images, other multimedia, and control the access as to whom can make changes.
Thank you and hopefully you found some benefit in reading this far! If you need help with your local internet marketing then Contact Us to schedule a call. We then, together, can customize a game plan to help you achieve what you would like to do in order to grow your business.
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