Build Your Local Business with SEO
Posted in Marketing on April 20th, 2011 by Nova Marxsen – Be the first to commentLocal SEO is a way to get your website well ranked in the search engines for local listings. This article will be focusing on some effective ways to use local SEO to get your website a higher search engine ranking.
As a marketer using local SEO, you really have to get into the mindset of someone in your target market who is doing a search engine query. It’s helpful to put yourself in their place if you want to apply SEO to your site. Pretend you were using a search engine to find something you were selling, and consider what terms you would most likely search under. Let us suppose you have a store whose specialty is golf accessories. Search engine users who type in “golf” are doing an extremely broad search and are mostly not going to be looking for what you have. Other searchers may be looking for “golf instruction,” which isn’t related to what your store sells. You are looking for customers who search for “golf accessories,” which is a match to what you have to offer. There are many good keyword that can create sales but are not quite as well known, and these are usually ignored by business owners looking for local traffic. They only look at the most popular keyword phrases, which get a high number of searches but also have lots of competition. You have to learn how to think like a customer because this is exactly what helps you in the long term. Your ability to find targeted keywords will improve with practice, and you’ll find more customers and you will eventually be able to rank for a variety of relevant keywords.
Getting Google Maps to list you is actually quite simple. You simply fill out a tiny form and then they’ll either use your phone or email to have you verify your identity. After that process is completed, you’ll only have to wait a few weeks before your site begins to reveal itself within the local searches. Google and Yahoo! are very similar in their application process, only Yahoo! doesn’t require a verification. Yahoo! will even allow you to design your business listing to your liking.
A simple SEO tip that is obvious is linking up with the locals. If you want to succeed as a local business, it’s essential to make inroads in your own town or city. To maximize your effectiveness as a local business, you should really focus your efforts on getting well respected and popular businesses and groups in your community to link to your site. The search engines favor sites with a good number of quality backlinks, and getting links from prestigious local sites is the way to get your site highly ranked for location based keywords. You have to convince the search engines that you are a local business that is important in your community. Keep in mind that what you are really looking for in backlinks is not so much the quantity, but relevance and quality. One link from the Chamber of Commerce is better than a 100 links from local blogs.
You should also try to list your business with all of the Yellow Pages and like directories online. You can start off with some of these sites such as YellowBook.com, YelloPages.com and SuperPages.com. A notable thing here is that YellowPages.com gets lots of local searches every month, over 100 million and the best part is that they offer free online listing. Of course, the major sites like MSN and About.com get some of their business listings from SuperPages.com. You can have a very basic listing with them for free.
In summary, what we’ve seen above are simple local SEO tips that you can apply to your current business and get more traffic..
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