Local Search Marketing

Applying search engine optimization strategies that include local qualifiers (Bucks County, Princeton Corridor, Greater Philadelphia, zip codes, etc.) to your website will place your site right in front of the local web surfers seeking your goods and services. Attracting local internet traffic is the most beneficial activity you could apply to your website. Search traffic will bring the most qualified type of visitor to your site – a visitor who is SEARCHING FOR YOU. These consumers are more inclined to buy from a local business owner, making search traffic easy to convert into customers.

If you do business in a 20 mile radius of Montgomery County, PA or Trenton, NJ why would you want to advertise anywhere else? Know that Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing are designed to deliver the most relevant results to the keyword phrases used….within a Geo-targeted area.  A large majority of searchers today are including these “local qualifiers” in their search phrases. You must also use these qualifiers in your page content to be “indexed” for these terms.

Reach Local Search Customers

If you’re like most the business owners we talk to you’ve noticed that your printed phone book directory advertising dollars are just not going as far as they used to. You can blame that on the internet. More people turn to search engines these days before bothering to pick up a local directory printed on yellow pages. The Search Engines favor many web based directories that follow solid business ethics and practices. Many directories have been penalized for conducting thier business with poor business ethics. You must be selective when making these choices of directory resources to associate your bussiness.

Submitting to directories helps increase your link popularity as well as targeted traffic because they place links to Web sites within specific categories. Some good directories include Yahoo! ® Directory and DMOZ which is part of the Open Source Directory Project.  A valued directory is considered an unbiased authority and links from directories are considered high quality links by search engine algorithms.

Local Search Marketing will be a primary topic of our bloggers so stay tuned for more great information to come on this subject.

Local SEO Keyword Tools

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool lets you enter a main keyword and it will list a number of associate keywords. It also estimates monthly search volume for those keywords which gives good clues to how many people tend to phrase things.

Google Trends shows a graph of keyword usage over the last few years. This is a great tool for seeing search trends – spotting rising and falling demand that will allow you to make intelligent decisions in your own keyword selection.

Google Insights is similar to Google Trends but with a little more insight including heat maps for geo-graphical areas (great for local) and similar keyword suggestions.