What Is Local SEO Marketing?
Local SEO Marketing is a strategy that many small businesses use to get the most out of their online presence. Local SEO stands for using your local market to your advantage, and just as any savvy business owner knows, bringing in local clients can be quite crucial to success: They’re easier (and thus cheaper) to reach than people who aren’t local. They also tend to buy from people who live within the immediate vicinity, so getting your business on their TVs, radios and internet (the ultimate win-win situation!) can really boost your sales.
So what makes local seo matter? Well, it’s the fact that you can get your business to be seen by more local customers than you might manage if you were selling to everyone on the planet. In the offline world, it’s not unusual for a business to have branches in a number of different towns and cities. But online – no one lives in ‘that’ city, so every website has to cater to an ever-expanding audience.
And it’s this problem that Local SEO matters. One of the main problems that small businesses face is that they have to compete with sites and companies that are fully optimized for larger audiences; sites like Google Places, and even the likes of Yahoo Local and Bing Local are designed around making sure that businesses can be found by searchers within a certain geographical area. But organic seo works differently. It looks for sites that contain specific keywords, rather than larger geographic areas – and it’s this that determines where your site should rank organically.
This is why we need to take a look at why the strategy of Local SEO matters. Essentially, the best way to improve your search engine ranking is to build a site that is found within certain areas, rather than on a global scale. Organic local seo marketing revolves around getting more local traffic to your web pages. In order to do this you need to submit to directories, and to make sure that your page has all the correct local citations. The reason for this is simple: if your page has citations all over the place, Google will consider it to be legitimate – and therefore rank it accordingly.
But what does Local SEO marketing mean? Basically, it involves building links within the various directories that are available online. The best way to optimize your links is to submit to as many directories as you can find. But the way you go about this is entirely up to you. You may want to get some advice from somebody who knows more about submitting to directories, or even trying out some pre-made optimization scripts.
However, the most important thing to remember when using Local SEO is that you need to concentrate on the location of your business information across the board. This means that you need to optimize your web pages within the various major search engines – but you also need to focus on the area in which you are located, too. By doing so, you ensure that your web pages rank higher in the search results than those within other areas.
One of the most common techniques that are used these days to rank well in Google Local is the usage of the local pack feature. The local pack is simply a snippet of text that is placed onto each of your web pages. This is used in order to rank your site fairly high in Google. Of course, the actual content that is included within a local pack is up to you – but it’s worth bearing in mind that most people use descriptive names for their business address – so be sure to keep your pages very descriptive.
You can also use local ranking to generate some extra backlinks, too. Many people use social bookmarking sites to publish links to their websites, and social bookmarking is also a great way to increase traffic to your site. If you start submitting high quality backlinks to high PageRank sites, then you will start seeing a positive difference in the amount of traffic that you receive from the search engines. Local SEO marketing is one of the best strategies available to ensure that you rank highly in all the major search results, which in turn will ensure that you receive quality traffic from local searchers.