SEO Musts for Local Business
The Internet might be global in nature, but if your business is local, it makes no sense to concentrate on global reach, when your customers live in your city, or even in your neighborhood. For local businesses getting a global reach is a waste of resources. Instead, you should concentrate on the local community. You might be asking how you can do it, when the Web is global and Google doesn't classify sites according to their location. Here is how you can go local with SEO:
Use your location in your keywords - The first trick is to use your location in your keywords. For example, if you are in London and you sell car insurance, your most important keyphrase should be “car insurance London” because this keyphrase contains your business and your location and will drive people who are looking for car insurance in London in particular.Use your location in Meta Tags -
Metatags matter for search engines and you shouldn't
miss to include your location, together with your other keywords in the
metatags of the pages of your site. Of course, you must have your
location in the keywords you use in the body text because otherwise it
is a bit suspicious when your body text doesn't have your location as a
keyword but your tags are stuffed with it.
Use your location in your body text - Keywords in the body text count a lot and you can't
afford to skip them. If your web copy is optimized for “car insurance”
only, this won't help you rank well with “car insurance London”, so make
sure that your location is part of your keywords.
Take advantage of Google Places and Yahoo Local - Google Places and Yahoo Local are great places to
submit to because they will include you in their listings for a
particular location.
Create backlinks with your location as anchor text - It could be a bit tricky to get organic backlinks with your location as
anchor text because some keywords with location don't sound very natural
– for instance, “car insurance London” isn't grammatically correct and
you will hardly get an organic inline link with it but you can use it in
the Name field to comment on blogs. If the blog is dofollow, you will
still get a backlink with anchor text that helps for SEO.
Get included in local search engine - Global search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo can bring you lots
of traffic but depending on your location, local search engines might
be the real golden mine. A local search engine could mean a search
engine for the area (though it is not very likely to have regional
search engines) or more likely for your country. For instance, Baidu is a
great option, if you are selling on the Chinese market.
Get listed in local directories -
In addition to local search engines, you need to try your luck with
local directories, too. You might think that nobody reads directory
listings but this isn't exactly so. For instance, Yellow Pages are one
of the first places where people look when searching for a local vendor
for a particular product.
Run locally-targeted ad campaigns -
One of the most efficient ways to drive targeted, local traffic to your
site is with the help of locally-targeted ad campaigns. PPC ads and
classifieds are the two options that work best – at least for most
webmasters.
Do occasional checks of your keywords - Occasionally checking the current search volume of your keywords is a
good idea because shifts in search volumes are quite typical. Needless
to say, if people don't search for “car insurance London” anymore
because they have started using other search phrases and you continue to
optimize for “car insurance London”, this is a waste of time and money.
Also, keep an eye on the keywords your competitors use – this will give
you clue which keywords work and which don't.
Use social media
Social media - can drive more traffic to a site than search engines and
for local search this is also true. Facebook, Twitter, and the other
social networking sites have a great sales potential because you can
promote your business for free and reach exactly the people you need.
Local groups on social sites are especially valuable because the
participants there are mainly from the region you are interested in.
Ask for reviews and testimonials - Client reviews and testimonials are a classical business instrument and
these are like letters of recommendation for your business. However, as
far as SEO is concerned, they could have another role. There are review
sites, where you can publish such reviews and testimonials (or ask your
clients to do it) and this will drive business to you. Some of these
sites are Yelp and Merchant Circle but it is quite probable that there
are regional or national review sites you can also post at.
Create separate pages for your different locations - When you have business in several locations, this makes the task a bit
more difficult because you can't possibly optimize for all of them – you
can't have a keyphrase such as “car insurance London, Berlin, Paris,
New York”. In this case the solution is to create separate pages for
your different locations. If your locations span the globe, you can also
create different sites on different, country-specific domains (i.e.
uk.co for GB, .de for Germany, etc.) but this is only reasonable to do,
if your business is truly multinational. Otherwise, just a separate page
for each of your locations will do.
These simple tips how to optimize your site for local searches are a
must, if you rely on the local market. Maybe you are already doing some
of them and you know what works for you and what doesn't. Anyway, if you
haven't tried them all, try them now and see if this will have a
positive impact on your rankings (and your business) or not.
For more info visit :- www.seostep.in
Comments