Local Search Engine Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

Local SEO, sometimes referred to as On Page Optimization, is like Organic Search Engine Optimization, yet you’re optimizing for a certain geographic area instead of a product, service or idea. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, WTF does all of that mean? Not really an invalid question.

The term Local SEO, or Local SEO as it’s often referred to, refers to the techniques used to target specific geographical areas. For example, instead of targeting only cities like Los Angeles with a search marketing campaign, a business could target just the cities of Salt Lake City, Ogden Utah, Nashville, Birmingham, Phoenix, Las Vegas and El Centro, California. Each of these cities have a vibrant culture and offer a wide array of products and services. If you have a successful website marketing campaign in any of these cities, chances are good that customers will also know where your business is located. This is local search engine optimization at its best.

In order to understand the power of Local SEO, it’s helpful to understand how search engines work. Search Engines, which include Google, Yahoo! and MSN, use data about searches that consumers do to determine what pages appear on their results page. Pages that appear on the top are highly ranked, while pages that are lower down the rankings are less popular. Because this is a dynamic process, it’s important to make adjustments to your online presence on a regular basis to keep your page ranked high, even if you don’t have any pages currently showing up on the first page of Google.

In order to get a piece of the pie and truly benefit from local seo, you need to have your page optimized. The key to search engine optimization (SEO) is finding a niche market that hasn’t been explored yet. By targeting searches that aren’t currently using search engines, you can offer a solution to a problem that isn’t being addressed by your competitors. If your business offers professional services, then you need to be on top of local searches that people are making queries about. You should also be able to provide the most relevant information based on those searches by integrating several elements into your page design, content and link structure.

Another way to take advantage of local seo is to create multiple listings on various directories for each specific search term or phrase. Google, in particular, has a tendency to give more attention to these kinds of listings, as they offer potential customers a chance to find more information about the business. Determining the number of directories and the quality of them is a process that requires lots of testing to find out what works and what doesn’t. The most effective listing may not be in the most popular directory, but it could still provide a valuable service to a potential customer.

Building a physical location in a particular city can be an effective local SEO strategy. Many local businesses, especially the smaller ones, cannot afford to build a large number of sites in that city. However, many local search engine marketing experts say that building up a presence in the local directory listings is better than having a big website. Smaller businesses often have a better chance at generating traffic through online methods. Therefore, building a physical location can be an effective way for them to get established in their local communities.

There are also several SEO strategies that can be used by small businesses to generate more traffic and target better keywords. Creating an inbound link from related websites or articles can be beneficial, as long as the site that posted the link is credible. Adding the website of your competitor to your website will help in creating credibility as well. While local seo strategies do not provide instant results, they can definitely help in the long run.

With the increasing competition that small businesses are experiencing, it would be wise for businesses to become familiar with local SEO strategies. In order to gain the maximum advantage of this type of marketing, businesses should employ the services of a professional SEO company. Using this 3 pack technique will allow you to increase the amount of website traffic and improve your search engine rankings.