Friday, September 6, 2013

Local Business Essentials

By Martin Summers


Although search engines provide you with global search options, as a local business you would want to concentrate on certain locations such as 'West End'. This is really important because any global search will bypass the targeted customers and would be a big drain on your advertising budget.

Concentrating on the local audience may appear difficult as Google doesn't group the sites depending upon their exact location, but with the following tips, you can easily tap your local market.

1. Your business location should be in your meta-tags

Ensure that your exact location is added within your site content. It won't help if you have optimised your site content for 'property company' as it is a generic term without any specific location associated with it. Instead 'property company in London' can do wonders for your business.

2. You must include your exact location in the meta-tags

Meta tags are quite significant for the search engines, therefore it is a must for you to include your exact location and any additional keywords in relevant pages on your website. For example; if you are providing property services in London, you can use 'flats for sale in London' within your body text and meta-tags.

3. You must use your specific location as a anchor text

You may face difficulty in building organic backlinks depending upon your location as such localized terms don't sound too natural. For instance; 'property London' or 'property company London' may not be grammatically correct, but they can be effectively used in the blogs with correct anchor text, for driving back traffic to your site.

4. Locally targeted PPC ads

An effective way to drive traffic to your site is by targeting your PPC ads locally. This ensures most effective use of your advertising budget and can drive local customers to your site.

5. Include your business in Yahoo Local and Google Places

It is always a good idea to check on the search volume for each of your keywords. Though a certain shift is usual over a period of time, if you find that people are not searching for 'property company London', you can replace it with 'property firm London' for example to achieve much greater results.

6. Make your ad-campaigns location based

You can drive significant traffic to your site with the help of locally targeted PPC campaign. You can easily drive local prospects to your site and make effective use of your marketing budget.

7. Use social media

Social media websites such as Facebook can drive highly targeted traffic to your business site and can drive up your sales as you can easily promote your location to your local audience.

8. Add testimonials and reviews from your past customers

You can win trust of your target audience by displaying that you deal in quality products and can be trusted. You can do this by publishing their testimonials and reviews on your site and dedicated review sites such as Yelp.

9. Check your keywords

You can drive higher traffic from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Here you can easily promote your products or services to your target audience.




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