Blog: Rural Business Marketing

When you think of rural America, you might often think of large farms where your nearest neighbor may be several miles away, rugged terrain where the roads are so curvy you can see your own brake lights, or it might be just sparse deserts.

Regardless of how you view rural America, I have compiled a list of seven statistics and facts about rural America into one infographic.

In today’s digital world, local SEO is crucial in helping businesses reach potential customers in their area. A staggering 9 out of 10 search engine users look for local businesses online, and nearly 5 out of 10 Google searches focus on finding local information. If your business isn’t ranking well in local search results, you could miss out on valuable clients and opportunities. Local Search Engine Optimization, or Local SEO, is a strategy that improves your rural small business’s online visibility by optimizing your content, social profiles, links, and citations for local search.

As a local rural business, utilizing local SEO techniques is essential for increasing your chances of survival in a competitive market. In this post, I will explain what local SEO is and how it works and provide tips and tricks to help you optimize your rural small business website for local search.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for the success of any business, regardless of size or location. At a high level, on-page SEO optimizes your website’s content and structure. In contrast, off-page SEO focuses on the actions and factors outside your website that can impact its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). This post will explore the importance of off-page SEO and how it can benefit your rural small business.

When you think of rural America, you might often think of steep mountains with few people or large farms where your nearest neighbor may be several miles away. It is also easy to assume rural markets are unreachable and disconnected from most traditional and digital marketing forms, but that’s not the case in the modern era.

Take these statistics into consideration:

• 72% of Rural Area U.S. Adults have home broadband access (Source: Pew Research Center)
• 80% of Rural Area U.S. Adults have a smartphone with internet access (Source: Pew Research Center)
• 78% of North Carolina has internet as of November 2021 (Source: Statista)
• States surrounding NC:
  • Tennessee: 79.1%
  • Virginia: 80.5%
  • Georgia: 81.2%
  • South Carolina: 81.3%

According to a Gallup poll, at the end of 2020, almost half of Americans said that if they could choose, they would choose a small town (17%) or rural area (31%) rather than a city or suburb.

Given these statistics, it is evident that rural America is seeing a resurgence in the small-town and rural lifestyle. Rural small businesses can capitalize on these new faces by positioning themselves better through their marketing efforts.

Therefore, let’s look at the following tips and tricks to help rural small businesses: