subject: How To Procure Customers And Optimize Your Business With Local Search Marketing [print this page] Local Search Marketing is critical to businesses, especially small and medium sized businesses, so that they are found by more customers. It helps elevate the presence of a local business and enables it to be found more easily by people searching for that particular product or service in their area.
In this technology driven age, 9 out of 10 Americans who use the Internet for local business information use search engines to do so. For any business that caters to local audiences, it is very important to be found in these search engines (e.g. Restaurants, Doctors, Lawyers, Real Estate Agents, Services such as plumbers, auto glass companies, etc.).Once the business listing is at the top of the search results, the possibility of more people finding your business and learning about your products/services will exponentially increase. Good rankings in organic search will drive the bulk of the traffic to your website and entice prospective consumers to become your customer.
Companies that provide Local Search Marketing Services understand the importance of marketing your company online, in social networks and most importantly in search engines where people are mainly looking. These services provide you with the opportunity to significantly impact your business by getting your site high visibility within search engines.Irrespective of the product or service, it is vital to ensure your website is ranked well in searches for your local area where you are being searched.
On-site optimization for local search plays an important role in both driving people to your site and making a visitor stay on your website once they visit it. From your sitemap, ALT tags, description tags, breadcrumbs, title tags and, most importantly, content, all aspects must work together to include and emphasize the keywords that you have selected to optimize.
In addition, having your local address and phone number on all pages is a good idea and it also builds a trust rank value for your website. Adding maps for directions is common now and embedding Google maps wherever feasible provides an interactive way for a customer to find their way to your location.
Keyword research for local search is important for a site seeking to get high qualified traffic from consumers interested in a particular type of business. Focussing on the right keywords or phrases is the key and requires experience and intelligence, coupled with the ability to imagine how consumers attempt to find your business online. Choosing the right keywords and optimizing them in the website design and content is very important; and for local search, this also includes long-tail location keywords, like local search marketing firm in Orange County, California for example.
Most people who search for a local product or service do so using local search keywords (location based). They use local search directories to find businesses, which is why it is important to have a presence on each of the major local search directories. (You must also optimize your profiles on these like you have done on your website as well.)
Social networking sites are probably the most widely used sites on the Internet after search engines. The immense popularity of sites like Facebook and Twitter is there for all to see, along with Google+ and now Pinterest. Creating a business page on Facebook and encouraging others to like and share it helps create a large base of potential customers for your business. Twitter also has value for local business marketing. With many people adding locations to Twitter bios and tweets, it isnt very difficult to find local users that you could ultimately turn into customers.
A strong and maintained presence on the several niche social media marketing sites has also proved to contribute towards an increased presence for businesses locally, and the role played by them as a small business marketing tool cannot be overlooked. All that said, local search engine marketing coupled with social media marketing is an important and integral part of business marketing strategies today.
