How to Promote Your Local Business in the Search Engines. Best Pratices and A Little Known Secret Revealed.

If you’re the owner or manager of a local business and you’re trying to expand your reach and presence, then you surely already know the value of search engine optimization. However, SEO for local businesses is a bit different than just general, all purpose SEO. There are some tried and true tactics that you can use to help give your website a local boost, which will help you immediately find more prospects and customers and become more of a force.

Local Search Results

All of the major search engines include options for local businesses to create profiles. For example on Google you can visit their Local Business Center and include your website name, location and contact information, give yourself a description and classify yourself in an industry.

The other major search engines offer similar setups, and it’s all very easy to work with.

Use relevant keywords and terms in your description and then when people make local searches for those terms, you’ll pop up right on the top of the search engine results, above everybody else, with a map, your website address, business name and more.

That’s the quickest and easiest way to improve your local SEO, and it can be extremely effective.

Consumer and Community Websites

One of the great tools at your disposal for a local business and SEO is the slew of consumer and community websites out there today. Popular websites such as Yelp, CitySearch, Insider Pages, and Trip Advisor, just to name a few, allow consumers to review, rate and describe any business they’ve been to. Make sure your website is on there, and encourage your customers to leave positive reviews.

Also reach out to any specific community websites such as for your town, for your business district or anything else to get your business and service listed.

These will all add a lot of really valuable SEO power and links to boost your own rankings. Additionally, they will help to establish your presence and individuals who already use these services and websites for their communities as opposed to just the search engines will now be exposed to you as well.

On Page Content

Last but certainly not least is the on page content you have for your website. This may actually be the most important of all. You need to have content on your website that ties you to a specific region or location.

The easiest way to do this is to include your contact information with address on all of your pages, perhaps on the footer.

But avoid doing what so many people do which is just stuffing every city and town name within hundreds of miles somewhere on your page. This isn’t going to help you out at all, and will just make you look worse to people who visit your page.

What you do want to do is create some articles, original content, blog posts or other material that is directly related to local communities.

If you clean houses in California, you could have a blog post about cheap house cleaning in San Francisco, and another one the best house cleaning services in Los Angeles, and so forth.

These will help you get found in different areas and for different phrases, and you will thrive from long-tail keyword searches.

Also be sure that you do all of your keyword research to dig up these valuable terms and phrases.

Keep in mind that people from different parts of the country and the world use various terms and phrases to mean the same thing, so be sure to readily know what people in your locale use to describe your area, your products and your services.

Underused SEM practice – Locally Targeted PPC

You can also create locally targeted pay per clicks. This will help you reach out to highly targeted prospects and customers, and to help drive up new business in a major way.

Create different local ads for a variety of towns or regions that you serve, and a host of your various products, services or other offerings so you can reach out to as many people as possible.

Using PPC advertising with local markets is also cheaper and more effective than generic, popular phrases. You’ll be targeting a smaller and less competitive niche as opposed to the whole available market, and the people who eventually click on your ads will be much more likely to be successfully converted.

You can also hire us!

Still confused? Don’t have the time to do it yourself? You can always hire us to do the dirty work for you, just contact us.