What is local SEO and how can it help your local business? How can local SEO (search engine optimization) help local business owners get onto the first page of Google? Here’s the good news, unlike a brick and mortar business where it’s very difficult to research your competition, with internet marketing for local business it is reasonably easy to carry out some research to find out if you stand a chance to beat your local competition.
This is particularly true for local marketing, where the competition in the local areas is very weak, not only are local business owners not clued up on Internet marketing, they tend to avoid it.
Most people nowadays do look for local services and products on the internet, if you think about it; you probably look on the Internet, for things that you are looking for, so why should you think that people are still looking in the newspapers and Yellow pages for your services.
Local SEO is finding out what people type into Google’s search bar to find your services and products, and Google has a free tool that you can use to find this out, you can find it by typing into your browser, Google free keyword tool.
Now type in a word or phrase that best describes your business, and click on search, you will then see how many searches a month are made, and an indication of how much competition there is for that phrase.
Google will even present you with suggestions of other phrases that people type in, and again it will give you the amount of searches, and an indication of the amount of competitors for that phrase.
You should be looking for a phrase that has a lot of searches but not much competition, spend some time on this to get the idea of how this works, and to find the best keyword phrases, you will need several in order to build your local website, and to get it to come up on the first page of Google for quite a few search terms.
It is important that you include your location within your titles and website address, to localize your website and business listings with the local business listing, and your Google places listing, this will help your customers find you.
I don’t want to go into too much detail in this article, but I hope that you are starting to get the idea, the point is that most businesses that do actually have a local business website, do not do this properly, they simply pay a website designer to build a website for them, and then call their business Joe Blogs plumbers or something similar, and wonder why they are not getting anywhere with their website.
The point that I am making here is that, there is a real possibility that any business that is prepared to take local SEO and local Internet marketing seriously, have the work properly carried out, and that they realize that marketing locally is needed on a continual basis, can easily dominate their local area.
There are all the tools available, and with local SEO and some help from Google places (Free local business listings) and local business directories, all of which should be optimized, that their local business will get on the first page of Google, and Google places in their local area, and leave their competitors at the starting gate, wondering how you have done it.
I do hope that you have found this article interesting and informative, if so please feel free to share it with your friends (but not your competitors) click the like or Google’s new +1 button, as well as comment on it.
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