Seven Strategies and Suggestions to Optimize your Site for Local Search
Optimizing your site for local search is easier than you think. Most medium and large companies don’t target local regions because the ROI isn’t there. Big box stores, thankfully, usually don’t see the need for SEO or search marketing. That leaves a lot of openings for small businesses to succeed where larger companies fall short.
Here are seven tested strategies that will help your small business succeed in search marketing and optimization.
Focus on a singular operating region. Every word you add to your page titles takes away from the words you already have. When you have a single region persisting through all your pages and content you gain more weight than if you were targeting several regions with a site of the same size.
Contextually relevant content is easier to build if you’re local, so take advantage of it. Weather reports, comments on local events and happenings, photos from around the region. All of these things add to a local SEO strategy and are much harder to implement effectively when you target a larger area.
Google Map Listings go a long way to increasing local traffic. Map listings are usually displayed ahead of standard search results and you can only get a verfied listing for the business that you list. Big box stores can get listings for all of their locations, but the verification process is much more labour intensive.
Don’t use a canned site builder. Many canned solutions don’t allow you to do any SEO on your site. It’s often set up to allow you to edit content, add photos and not much else. I’ve seen cases where people don’t own the domain or the design and get locked into bundled solutions. Before you buy a website solution, ask questions like “will I own the domain” and “do I own the source files and do I get source control?”. If the answer to either of these questions is “no”, hang up the phone and walk away.
Networking works more effectively. When you actually know the people you network with, it’s easier to make that network translate into online connections. Just walk over to your neighbour with the website, and ask if they’ll link to you to recommend your services. You’ll need fewer links to achieve search success, and they’re much easier to get.
You don’t have to be the best, just one better. I can’t say this enough. When you SEO your site for local search, competitive research will tell you exactly how well you have to do to get on top and it’s usually not that much. Most small businesses haven’t done any SEO to their site, or the SEO they’ve done is old, so you just have to do a little better.
½ hour a day is plenty. If you can spare ½ hour each day for 6 months, it’s likely that you’ll win the search wars over your competitors. Most small businesses don’t spend that much time on SEO. Even realtors, who operate in one of the most competitive niches on the net, don’t spend that kind of time.
By applying the above steps you should see your own site climbing search positions in no time flat. For more information, read my blog post on Why Small Businesses have a Better Chance of Ranking in Search Engines
Sean Enns is the blogger behind Harbour City SEO in Nanaimo, BC. He writes about marketing strategies for small businesses based on his 12+ years of experience in direct and internet marketing. He is currently providing SEO advice and consultations via Harbour City SEO in Nanaimo while acting as Director of Marketing and Communications for Hosting Nation Data Inc.
