subject: Increase Website Traffic With Local Search Marketing [print this page] Increase Website Traffic With Local Search Marketing
Many businesses have realized that it is important to have a presence on the Internet. This not only helps to increase the brand awareness of the company, but also increase sales and consequent revenues from customers. However, having a website is not all that is required for a business to get sales; the website has to be found on search engine results. Thus, webmasters have to implement various search engine techniques to get their websites to the top of search engine results.
Businesses that serve limited areas will be better off optimized for local search engine optimization (SEO) than general search. Local SEO primarily consists of using the neighborhood or town name before or after the keyword that the website is being optimized for. For example, a person looking for dentists in Virginia is more likely to look for "dentists in Virginia" or "Virginia dentists" rather than simply "dentists." Local SEO is effective for small businesses that have a limited market scope or that market locally.
Apart from using localized keywords, companies can also submit articles about the business to article directories. If written well, the articles are likely to rank high in search engines and people who read them wall be directed to the author's website, in this case, the business's website. The major article directories usually have a high page rank on search engines and submitting an article there will not only increase traffic to the website, but will also help the website rank high due to the one-way backlink that will be created. Most businesses prefer to outsource their article marketing requirements to companies that provide affordable SEO services.
Businesses can also increase traffic to their websites by link building. There are different methods of link building. Some of these include gaining links from other webmasters, posting comments on blogs that allow the "do-follow" tag, making profiles on high page rank forums and using a forum signature to link back to the website, writing press releases and submitting them to Internet news sites, social bookmarking, social media marketing among others.
Local SEO can be an intensive process and most businesses look for professional SEO companies to optimize their websites. A good search engine optimization company should offer affordable SEO services and must also follow ethical rules in optimizing the customer's website. Before working with a local SEO company, the customer should ask for references or case studies of the works the company has done in recent months. This will help the customer know whether it will be worth it to work with the company.
