beantownseo.com

As the Web continues to expand and consumers are turning to the search engines for local content, what businesses should be satisfying that demand?

Right now most organic search results are owned by 800 pounds gorillas such as Yelp, Switchboard.com, Directory M, and other large national sites. But do they have the best information about local businesses? Maybe in time, but the small businesses themselves should be the best source for finding the information that local consumers are looking for.

So how does your small business take control of the local search results and connect directly with the consumer? Here are some tips…

• Build a website – DUH! You need to have a place to drive searchers to. All it needs to be is one page with contact information, some sort of mission statement, and imagery/branding that will make the consumer feel you are an established and trusted business. Think of it as an online brochure. Make sure to mention the cities/towns/regions your business services in all the right places (body copy, browser title, and meta descriptions.
• Submit to Google and Yahoo Local (and any other search engines with a local directory) – The major search engines are integrating and sometimes even preempting organic search results with local result. Be there or risk being missed by your potential customers.
• Get into those local directories – You know the 800 pound gorillas I mentioned above? Make sure you’re there.  There will also be a handful of town and state-specific directories that it may be worthwhile to submit to. Being included in these directories will have the benefit of increasing the number of incoming links to your website and increasing your “link popularity” or as Google calls it “PageRank“. Search engines analyze the links pointing to your site as they crawl the Web, so the more relevant links you can get, the better chance you have in being visible in the results.
• Expand your local content – As you start to get some good momentum you’ll notice that a one page site can only be relevant for so many keywords. This is why you’ll eventually have to consider expanding your site to have content/pages on each region and/or service you provide. For example, a dog walking business that services Boston and the surrounding cities should have pages that target “cambridge dog walking”, “dorchester dog walking”, etc. It’s important to note that just creating these pages isn’t enough – you’ll need to make sure you’re linking to them so they’re not “islands” with no incoming links.
• Dabble in Paid Search – You’ll find that some keywords are so competitive that you will need to put in a lot of work to show up in the organic search results, but the beauty of pay-per-click search advertising (a la Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter) is instant visibility! Start off by only targeting the most specific terms so you’re absolutely sure that the traffic you’re paying for is valuable. Also, consider using geo-targeting and exact matches in some cases. For instance, paying for traffic on the term “dog walking” would be expensive and there is no guarantee that the searcher is in the Boston area. A better keyword target would be “boston dog walking” because you know the intent of the searcher. Bottom line: WALK BEFORE YOU RUN with PPC advertising. I would recommend consulting with a PPC expert if you want to take your campaign to the next level.

That’s it for now. Happy Holidays everyone!