Our director of International Partnerships and Re-selling, Rahul Chauhan had the pleasure of appearing as a special guest on the Game of Growth podcast on the Truepush platform to share his views on the importance of a digital presence and online visibility in today’s environment.
You can listen to the entire episode here. In the meantime, we have highlighted some key points from the interview:
The importance of a Local SEO strategy
Rahul started off by shedding light on the need for businesses of all types to have a clearly defined Local SEO strategy. Many businesses from SMB’s to large corporations still don’t have a clear idea of how Google’s search engine works and how the shift in consumer behaviour has affected this.
“The basic challenge that we face today is to improve digital engagement with a limited budget, skills, and also the local understanding of how exactly local SEO works in the online business marketplace. Google My Business (GMB) is something that businesses need to take a bit more seriously.”
He also elaborated on the opportunity that businesses have to reach more people with the number of platforms that are currently available. “The first step forward of managing your information online in different publishers and online directories are super important. If we talk about India, we are close to around 20 million Apple users and yet hardly any business wants to improve their online presence on Apple maps or Siri, for instance. In this case, businesses are missing out on the positive aspects that can be harnessed from these channels like Apple. It’s very logical to focus on the basics of online marketing before going out and building up a fancy website.”
Need for a centralised platform
Given the increasing number of information sources that are arising, it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to manually manage all their information. “ It’s a nightmare for small businesses and even for large retailers like supermarkets where they want to manage and improve their online presence. It gets very difficult for a customer to find relevant information because their information is around multiple websites and publishers across the globe and these steps need to be taken care of to start owning the business based on their information on all the online platforms.
If they are not saved or relevant, it can create an illusion and confusion in customers’ minds. So this is exactly what we are trying to solve for the businesses where they can manage the road and modify one single sole information across the web as One voice to your customers.”
The role of E-reputation
Finally Rahul gave us a small sneak peek into the role that e-reputation will have in the decision-making process of the consumer. With online reviews growing in influence, he stressed on the fact that businesses now need to be more proactive when responding to customer feedback to improve the engagement and ultimately their local search engine ranking.
