subject: How to Take Advantage of Local SEO for Your Business [print this page] How to Take Advantage of Local SEO for Your Business
Local SEO is becoming more and more popular, especially since geographic based marketing is catching up. The follow article will present three efficient local SEO ideas that will help increase the rank of your business in the search engines for any keywords you choose.
You might find this rather shocking but the truth is that bad reviews aren't really negative. The thing is, no matter how perfect your company tries to be there will always be a scope for improvement. If users can only find positive reviews about a particular company, they might grow suspicious, thinking something is off. It could even convince them to look for another company that appears more trustworthy and reliable. This is clearly proof that you shouldn't be too negative about bad reviews. They are simply part of your company and should be treated as such. Actually, it's a perfect opportunity for you to make your product or service better to meet the demands of your customers, which will only serve to improve your reputation.
If you want people to recognize your site locally then you need to ask openly for reviews. If you shy from this one tactic, you'll lose many good opportunities. The majority of the local sites are completely fine with your interacting with your customers and asking them to review you. So, why shouldn't you enjoy all the advantages of this technique?
It's just about taking out the time to personally tell your customers to review you. Of course, that doesn't mean you have to go out and ask people face to face. You can simply post a message like "We would really appreciate it if you could review our business on Google/Bing/Yahoo local." You should put up this message on your site, in your email signature and on your thank you page that comes up after they have gotten in touch with you or signed up for a newsletter. Irrespective of whether they are bad, ugly or good, these reviews will improve the credibility of your company and it will bring you more customers.
Lastly, but certainly not least, to make it easier to rank in a certain geographical area you should consider hosting your site on a server based in the area. You will gain more SEO points because the search engines will relate the location of the server to your site. Since it can have a fair bit of impact, it is best to check the location of the server where you are considering hosting your site.
In this article we have learned that local SEO is highly important especially if you want to drive quality, localized traffic. The biggest benefit to this form of SEO is that you don't have to deal with a lot of competition because you aren't facing big sites from all over the world making ranking a lot easier.
