LOCAL SEO | GOWEBLIVE.COM
Author - Tim Weber, GoWebLive.com
Are you taking advantage of local search engine marketing strategies? If not then you should! It is the most cost effective way to attract heavy web traffic and increase your business sales. With the advent of internet, the competition is not restricted to local grounds anymore and it has gone global; but this does not mean that in the quest of capturing market share from different corners of the world you forget to optimize your local search results. Did you know that most searches are made locally through geo-specific searches? This means if you are not fully leveraging your business through local SEO marketing strategies, you might be leaving a huge chunk of potential business.
Also, high geographic/local search results help you attract more walk in and foot traffic. According to Google and Bing, more than 20% of the desktop search queries and over 50% of the queries through smart phones are local in nature. And this percentage is expected to go higher in 2013.
Therefore when developing your search engine optimization marketing mix strategies, you should always include local SEM practices too.
When it comes to local search engine marketing, the strategies are similar to the ones used to optimize global search results however; the slight difference is that they are more localized.
Here are some popular local search engine marketing strategies that you can focus on:
Here, you need to look out for target keywords that generate the local algorithm for example key phrase combinations like the city name and the keyword. You can use such keyword phrases in your content write-ups and float online for it to be crawled and increase your SERPs.
For example, a dental service provider located in West Yorkshire, can optimize on local keyword phrases like dental implants in West Yorkshire or cosmetic dentistry in West Yorkshire.
Another strategy is to list in local directories and also advertise on local portals. It’s highly cost effective and provides a solid return on investment. For this, you need to make sure that your website pages rank well and are listed properly in relevant local search results by a small amount of link building.
For listing in local directories you will be charged but that’s all good if you are driving heavy target web traffic and converting leads into sales.
By fully optimizing your online business profile you can easily boost your search visibility. For this, you need to build customized fields and also create informative business descriptions.
In Google Places you can create up to 5 categories. Choose the categories that are relevant to your business and offer high search volume. Since this is a local search engine marketing strategy to attract more area based target audience, make your profile description keyword rich, post photos, videos and maps of your business location.
This strategy is ideal for those business owners targeting multiple towns. You can optimize your website’s homepage on the most competitive town and target other towns in the inner web pages. Use title tags and internal linkage to optimize your search engine ranking.
After the implementation of local search engine marketing strategies, you need to evaluate and track the performance to see if the strategies achieved the desired results or not. For this you can leverage website analytic tools like Alexa, Piwik and Google Analytic. Using these tools you will be able to view the difference in inflow of traffic, sources and which location generated more business.
Try these local SEM strategies to ensure you don’t lose your business to your competitors.
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