Best ways to advertise a local shop (online)?

[dan]

Hello,
I was asked to help a local shop for advertising online and gain some real customers. As it is a barber shop, it has its own website and I was thinking to work on SEO to increase hits. What else do you suggest? Or what do professional businesses do normally?

[Jake]

Local SEO is a specialty, it does you little good to rank on the other side of the world, of course having the address in tour Contact Us page that's identically formatted like all other citations on free business directories. Having a few articles about other locations in your city, including their addresses could boost the local connection a bit. Might be able to get a chamber of commerce site link to the site as well.

Try searching Barber, your city, you should see Google Places page results with A-G labeled stick in symbols, these may be more valuable and easier to rank than your main site, though the ranking of the company site might effect the places page ranking. After confirming ownership from a postcard you can access the Google+ page and add images text and videos, perhaps assigning it to more index categories.
http://Google.com/placesforbusiness

[Joe]

Use a keyword tool.
Using a tool in order to determine the keywords of your site would go a long way, as far as using SEO as one of the techniques to gain more website traffic is concerned. There are lots of keywords tools that you can take advantage of today. Whatever type of tool you want to make use of, make sure that it is effective, so that you won’t be wasting your time on it.

[Kim Cunnings]

There are many options, both paid and "free".
For example, you can buy Google ads (AdWords) or Facebook Ads.
Or you can optimize for Google Maps
Other than that, it's really difficult and could be not really beneficial if you optimized for Google's Web search.
Besides, many marketers tie the success of one's local SEO campaign to mobile and social.
If you are active on social media and have a mobile-ready site, you'll drive even more sales.
It's really a cycle and a system where different parts are interconnected.
For example, a shopper stops by your store and sees a QR code there.
They scan the code, and either end up on your site where they can get a coupon or something.
Alternatively, you can ask them to leave a review on Google+ which would help you get better rankings (if it's positive).

[James]

First thing I would do is a reputation analysis then I would come up with a press release strategy. Since today social media is very powerful, I would do all the profile creation and optimization of the most popular social site...don't forget to tell their story on social media, most try to sell when they should be providing answers and value to potential customers. Next, step up all the NAP's (name, address, phone number) in local seo and submit to all the appropriate sites. This is not an over night job. They need to understand that 6 months is a good time frame to start seeing organic results. Good Luck!