Businesses having customers in a small geographical area findlocal search marketing extremely useful. To maximize the return-on-investment of their online marketing budgets small businesses should target their campaigns at specific demographics.
The first part of local search marketing is optimization of the meta and alt tags on the business’ site. In the same way as in global Search Engine Optimization (SEO) each business has to first do some keyword research both on their business niche and their location. Businesses must find the keywords potential clients use to research their products in their area. Good internet marketers know what keywords to use and come up with the work plan.
The easiest way to apply local search marketing is to just add the city or town name after the keywords they would use for global SEO. As an example, if a business is a confectionary shop in Manhattan instead of using “best sweets” as keywords they should use “best sweets in Manhattan”.
The keywords would be different if the target group of the campaign was larger. If the target geographical area is a county or a state the business will use the appropriate name after the main keywords.
A second part of local search marketing is listing the business’ URL on directories. Listing the business in these directories shows up in search results quickly unlike traditional SEO which takes a long time. Local search marketing is not a really expensive solution since most SEO companies offer affordable directory listing packages. The listings are really good as back links and as traffic funnels for the company’s site sending a fair amount of traffic that way.
Local search marketing as a whole is far more affordable than full blown SEO for a global audience. This is mainly because it is significantly easier to rank high for the local search criteria than for more general keywords. Ranking higher provides more organic traffic, hence more leads and more sales. It provides companies with a huge opportunity to reach a large number of the target audience for a relatively limited budget.
The upside of local search marketing is even more attractive for small and medium sized businesses that are actually targeting only local clientele and have limited budgets to do it.