The amount of local searches is more than at any other time in the history of the internet. You are about to learn some SEO techniques that will be helpful for achieving success.
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. Many people search for the term "golf," but this doesn't describe what you sell, as it includes too many things And if they put in "golf clubs," it's still not a good match since your store doesn't sell golf items other than the accessories. Some people, however, will type in "golf accessories," and since this is your specialty, you should be targeting this keyword phrase. Business owners, who are looking out to drive local traffic, forget to go for these less popular keyword phrases that can bring in real sales. They tend to target the same keywords eve ryone else is trying to rank for, the very top ones with the most traffic. The more you can think like a prospect, the better you can plan your SEO campaigns. 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.
When you're targeting local sites listing services such as Yahoo! Local, Bing Local and Google Places, you should first start off by logging into them and claiming your profile. If you want to claim your profile on any of these sites, there are a few steps you have to complete to verify various facts about yourself, and this includes verifying your phone number and address. You can do all this in a few minutes, and it will immediately put you in a better position than those who didn't bother with it. You should also post pictures to local site listings, as this gives you more credibility when people find your listing. It isn't hard to upload some pictures from your site, camera or desktop, and it can benefit you quite a bit. While these don't have to be professional quality photographs, you do want them to reflect well on your business, so they should be fairly good.
When you are doing local SEO, it's important to connect with other local websites. If you want to succeed as a local business, it's essential to make inroads in your own town or city. To increase your website ranking, as well as your overall reputation as a local business, you should seek out quality, relevant links to your site from established and highly regarded groups and businesses in your area. This is fairly straightforward, as sites with good backlinks are always better ranked by the search engines, and the best way to rank for keywords that are specific to a certain location is to get backlinks from highly regarded websites from that location. Doing this will cause the search engines to see you as a quality site in your location. Keep in mind that what you are really looking for in backlinks is not so much the quantity, but relevance and quality. A link from a well known group like your local Chamber of Commerce will be much more effective than a hundred from obsc ure bloggers in your area.
Don't worry so much about getting a huge number of links, but look for quality instead.
These are some of the best ways to generate targeted traffic to your local business. These are mostly simple tasks but they can take you a long way.
No comments:
Post a Comment