Congratulations on taking the plunge into the world of local internet marketing. You’ve finally decided to stop throwing money at the Yellow Page black hole, and figure out how the internet phenomenon can boost your business. However, you may be a bit confused on how to start. After reading this article you’ll be ready for some DIY local marketing.
Claim Your Local Listings
Do a search on Google for [insert your city here] pizza places, and in the top results you’ll see a map, along with seven local pizzerias. This is known as the Google Seven Box.
You can claim your listings, by signing up for a Google Local Business Center account. Once you have you’ll want to fill out as many fields as possible while optimizing your business profile to achieve maximum visibility.
Here are a couple optimization tips:
* If possible, add your important keyword term to the title. Maybe you’re business is called Marty’s Pizza, but an optimized title would be Marty’s [insert city] Pizza. Also include your keyword phrase in the description. Later on I’ll talk about choosing what keywords to optimize around.
* Don’t use a 800 phone number, use a local area code number in the listing.
* Include pictures. Don’t use generic file names like 0001.jpg but a more specific name like martys-cityname-pizza-dining-room.jpg.
* Encourage the vocal customers who love your business to leave a positive online review.
Once you’ve claimed your business on Google Local, claim other local listings on Yahoo, Yelp, Superpages and Merchant Circle. Similar rules apply, fill out as much as possible while optimizing for keyword terms.
Choosing Local Keyword Terms
Before optimizing a local listing, you need to know what phrases people are actually searching on. It doesn’t help to optimize for a term that only 2 people search on a month.
Fortunately, there’s a tool that can help the Google Keyword Tool. Type a phrase into the tool and it will approximate the global, and local number of monthly searches for keywords in your area. Try to optimize for local keywords that get at least 500 local searches per month.
Local SEO
You want to get listed in more than the map results. What will influence your results in the natural, left hand listings in the number of backlinks to your site, preferably from other local websites.
Excellent sites for backlinks include local chambers of commerce, business associations, and newspapers. Also helping out local charities could get you backlinks from their sites. What’s important to remember is that you don’t want the link to be your company name, rather the linked text should be the keyword phrases(s) you’re optimizing around, so ask the webmasters of these sites anchor the links to your keyword terms.
There’s also onsite techniques that will help you rank for local terms. For instance, include your full address on the contact page. Better yet, make it prominent on every page of your site – doing so won’t help with rankings but it does make it easier for visitors to contact you.
Start a blog, but only if you can dedicate time to write at least once each week. Some topics that make great SEO fodder are talking about local events like festivals, and conferences that you attend, or the local charities that you support.
Local PPC
You can also buy placements on the right hand side of search results for local keyword phrases. Even better you can target PPC ads to only show in specific geographic locations, such as metro areas or even zip codes.
Under the settings tab for each PPC campaign, in the Locations, Languages and Demographics section there is an option to link your Google Local listing account to Adwords. Turning this on will display your business address in the footer of every ppc ad for that campaign. This is an additional relevancy factor that often increases click through rates for your ads, which will also decrease the cost you pay for each click.
You’re ready for Local Internet Marketing
It’s best to capture as much screen real estate as you can for local searches, with the techniques listed you should be able to grab the maximum amount of visibility, and a significant amount of new customers from the web.
Jesse Kanclerz is a Rochester internet marketing consultant who helps local and national companies drive business results from the web. Contact him to talk about using internet marketing techniques like search engine optimization and paid search marketing to jump start your business.
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