Three Successful SEO Techniques Everyone Should Learn - Search Engines - SE Tactics

Local SEO is how business owners can get more search engine traffic from people searching in their area. If you apply some of the local SEO techniques we'll be discussing, you'll be able to get your site ranked more highly.

The key to local SEO is to put yourself in the place of your prospective customers when they do searches. It's helpful to put yourself in their place if you want to apply SEO to your site. The real question you have to ask is, if you were the customer, what word or term would you search under if you were looking for one of your own products? Let us suppose you have a store whose specialty is golf accessories. Someone who types in "golf" in the search field is probably not your ideal prospect, because this term is too general. 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 are fixated on the top keywords that get mo st of the traffic, but that thousands of others are also targeting. Putting yourself in the place of your prospect is what gives you the best insight into creative and profitable keywords. As you test various keywords and come up with more appropriate ones, you will get more traffic and you'll be able to rank well for many different keywords in your niche.

It's important to have distinct landing pages if your business has more than one location. For businesses with multiple locations, there's nothing wrong with targeting each one separately, though it's not a good idea to create more than one listing for each one. What you have to do, though, is make sure that you create a different landing page for every location, and each one should clearly refer to that one in particular. Don't make the mistake of sending both the local listings back to the same landing page or the home page because this just wouldn't serve the purpose. You don't want your target audience to get confused in any way, which is why having a dedicated landing page will take you a long way. Even though this might look like a simple thing, it does matter.

Another thing to always remember is to put your address on every webpage of your website. If you can do this, the search engines will favor you and you'll rise within the ranks. What should you put in your address? You should have your business address, phone number and last but not the least, your zip code listed on all the pages of your site. You'll then reveal yourself to be going after local searches and that makes it easy for the searches. In summary: local search engine optimization does require some extra effort on your part but later on, when you have an easier time of reaching your target market, you'll know the extra work has paid off.