subject: Local Search And How It Can Boost Your Business [print this page] When people are planning their internet marketing strategy, a large number of them tend to overlook the benefits that can be gained by zeroing in on local search. There are many internet marketing tools out there, but SEO tends to be among the most important because of the sheer volume of traffic which still travels through natural search. However, in the SEO arena, too many people forget about the powerful effect that local search can have in boosting the performance of a small business in the search results.
Local Search refers to using the geography of your business to rank higher when people search for businesses in your area. There are a number of easy ways that you can help take your local search power to the next level. Like most SEO techniques, these don't require a large investment of money, and instead just require some tweaking to your website and too your link building campaign.
Right on your own site there is something that you can do which is immediately going to help you perform better in the local search results. The most important thing that you can do in this regard is to make sure that you have a full "contact" page with all of your address details. This means a full street address, including a zip code, as well as having your phone number with a local area code. This is going to help you a great deal, and you may actually want to include that information on other pages besides the contact page.
The next thing that you're going to want to do is to focus your link building efforts on directories of local businesses. This might be anything from a local chamber of commerce website to your local yellow pages. Inclusion in these types of directories which are geographically focuses are incredibly powerful when it comes to boosting your performance in Google and the other search engines for local results.
Social media is also becoming localized and geographical in nature, and can be a good way to be on the cutting edge of ways to boost your local search results. Using tools like foursquare and Google Buzz can be great ways to help to boost your local search results in some non-traditional SEO ways, and can help you achieve faster and more potent results. Use all the methods together in a balance to achieve the best results.
