subject: Local Seo - All You Need To Know [print this page] As a local SEO marketer you should try to think like your targeted prospects/customers/searchers. You need to get into their shoes to truly understand the essence of SEO. The real question you have to ask is, if you were the customer, what word or term would you search under if you were looking for one of your own products? Imagine that you are the owner of a store that sells only one kind of item, golf accessories.
Someone who types in "golf" in the search field is probably not your ideal prospect, because this term is too general. And if they put in "golf clubs," it's still not a good match since your store doesn't sell golf items other than the accessories. Someone who enters "golf accessories," though, is a likely customer for your store, so this is the kind of keyword to be focusing on. Business owners, who are looking out to drive local traffic, forget to go for these less popular keyword phrases that can bring in real sales. And instead aim at highly popular keywords that have lots of traffic. The more you can think like a prospect, the better you can plan your SEO campaigns.
Your ability to find targeted keywords will improve with practice, and you'll find more customers and you will eventually be able to rank for a variety of relevant keywords. A vastly overlooked local SEO method is that of listing all of the locations your business works within in your ads. In other words, you should let the search engines know about the other cities, counties and/or states that you're serving.
How should you go about this? By simply listing out all the cities in your area in bullet points won't give you great results, but when you mention them in line with your sites content, it will make a difference. This is because search engines like having as much data as possible to analyze about the businesses and websites that are on the internet. This can help you quite a bit with your local SEO. The major thing that you need to remember when putting together your local SEO campaign is that, while all of these tips seem easy enough, using them together can do quite a lot for your success.
You should also look for quality backlinks from high status websites in your area that will help you with the search engines. Try to get listed by well regarded groups in your area, such as the Chamber of Commerce or Better Business Bureau, as these are the kind of links that give you the most pull. You can easily find additional ideas by searching with the name of your area and a term like "business directories." Then you'll have a useful list of local websites you can try to get a listing with. You can easily locate these sites, so don't neglect to take this step.
In conclusion, by keeping these local SEO strategies in mind, you can get more traffic and better ranking for your local business.