The Internet might be global in nature, but if your business is local, it
makes no sense to concentrate on global reach, when your customers live in your
city, or even in your neighborhood. For local businesses getting a global reach
is a waste of resources. Instead, you should concentrate on the local
community. You might be asking how you can do it, when the Web is global and
Google doesn't classify sites according to their location. Here is how you can
go local with SEO:
The first trick is to use your location in your keywords. For example, if
you are in London and you sell car insurance, your most important keyphrase
should be “car insurance London” because this keyphrase contains your business
and your location and will drive people who are looking for car insurance in
London in particular.
Metatags matter for search engines and you shouldn't miss to include your
location, together with your other keywords in the metatags of the pages of
your site. Of course, you must have your location in the keywords you use in
the body text because otherwise it is a bit suspicious when your body text
doesn't have your location as a keyword but your tags are stuffed with it.
Keywords in the body text count a lot and you can't afford to skip them. If
your web copy is optimized for “car insurance” only, this won't help you rank
well with “car insurance London”, so make sure that your location is part of
your keywords.
Google Places and Yahoo Local are great places to submit to because they
will include you in their listings for a particular location.
It could be a bit tricky to get organic backlinks with your location as
anchor text because some keywords with location don't sound very natural – for
instance, “car insurance London” isn't grammatically correct and you will
hardly get an organic inline link with it but you can use it in the Name field
to comment on blogs. If the blog is dofollow, you will still get a backlink
with anchor text that helps for SEO.
Global search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo can bring you lots of
traffic but depending on your location, local search engines might be the real
golden mine. A local search engine could mean a search engine for the area
(though it is not very likely to have regional search engines) or more likely
for your country. For instance, Baidu is a great option, if you are selling on
the Chinese market.
In addition to local search engines, you need to try your luck with local
directories, too. You might think that nobody reads directory listings but this
isn't exactly so. For instance, Yellow Pages are one of the first places where
people look when searching for a local vendor for a particular product.
One of the most efficient ways to drive targeted, local traffic to your
site is with the help of locally-targeted ad campaigns. PPC ads and classifieds
are the two options that work best – at least for most webmasters.
Occasionally checking the current search volume of your keywords is a good
idea because shifts in search volumes are quite typical. Needless to say, if
people don't search for “car insurance London” anymore because they have
started using other search phrases and you continue to optimize for “car
insurance London”, this is a waste of time and money. Also, keep an eye on the
keywords your competitors use – this will give you clue which keywords work and
which don't.
Social media can drive more traffic to a site than search engines and for
local search this is also true. Facebook, Twitter, and the other social
networking sites have a great sales potential because you can promote your
business for free and reach exactly the people you need. Local groups on social
sites are especially valuable because the participants there are mainly from
the region you are interested in.
Client reviews and testimonials are a classical business instrument and
these are like letters of recommendation for your business. However, as far as
SEO is concerned, they could have another role. There are review sites, where
you can publish such reviews and testimonials (or ask your clients to do it)
and this will drive business to you. Some of these sites are Yelp and Merchant
Circle but it is quite probable that there are regional or national review
sites you can also post at.
When you have business in several locations, this makes the task a bit more
difficult because you can't possibly optimize for all of them – you can't have
a keyphrase such as “car insurance London, Berlin, Paris, New York”. In this
case the solution is to create separate pages for your different locations. If
your locations span the globe, you can also create different sites on
different, country-specific domains (i.e. uk.co for GB, .de for Germany, etc.)
but this is only reasonable to do, if your business is truly multinational.
Otherwise, just a separate page for each of your locations will do.
These simple tips how to optimize your site for local searches are a must,
if you rely on the local market. Maybe you are already doing some of them and
you know what works for you and what doesn't. Anyway, if you haven't tried them
all, try them now and see if this will have a positive impact on your rankings
(and your business) or not.
from: http://www.webconfs.com/seo-articles.php
from: http://www.webconfs.com/seo-articles.php
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