Search Trafficker

How often do you search for businesses within the nearest town or surrounding area?

The importance of locality still plays a huge part in people’s searching habits. Local search marketing is all about optimising your online visibility for a specific location. This location is usually where the business is based or where the target market is located.

Local search marketing is part of a wider blended search marketing strategy; however it does offer the unique opportunity to focus in on your surrounding community. Despite the rise of the global village and the increasing ability to source our products and services from anywhere in the world, many still look locally. This is why many small businesses are turning to local search marketing for their local advertising needs. Many people in the United Kingdom, and globally, own hand-held devices which can search the World Wide Web, and can therefore look for a local service wherever.

What do I Stand to Gain from Local Search Marketing?

•Increased visibility in the search engines

•Improved visitor numbers from targeted locations

•Raised local profile

•Promote brand identity

•Boost conversions!

Strangely, local search engine marketing still remains a much underused resource. With focus often placed elsewhere, perhaps Pay-Per-Click or standard search marketing; don’t let your site miss out on promoting your geographical identity online. Geographic and regional focus for search marketing is becoming essential for small businesses to be found on the web.

Local search marketing takes many guises. Fundamentally it can be as simple as including your service with a location within HTML and visible copy (for example: search marketing Ulverston). This will then show search engines exactly what you do and where you are. Listings in Google Maps and Yahoo Local will also help your local search marketing campaign.

Boost Your Local Search Rankings

Of course, to get to the top of the rankings and achieve the very best results, it takes a far more structured and intensive approach. At the Search Marketing Group we can help your campaign to target specific customers in the right locations so that your local advertising is as efficient as can be.

If local search is something that you’d like to know more about or are interested in, get in contact. We can offer impartial advice and help you find a search engine marketing package that will suit your needs.

Companies who use search marketing should choose their keywords carefully. This is the advice from a leading ethical search marketing firm, the Search Marketing Group. When the campaign is focused on local search terms, hence local search marketing; the company needs to be especially careful.

It is also important to index a website for local search engines. This could include optimising the website for local search phrases. This will increase traffic to the site through the search engines for that particular phrase, with a higher hit rate, as the traffic will be more specific for the search phrase. This is one method of local search marketing. Others include adding the site to mapping directories and business directories so it will appear in mapping search software such as Google Maps. This type of software is becoming more and more popular as the hand-held search market expands.

Industry experts know that the people who work for search engines are given advice on keywords and local search marketing. An example of this type of local advertising is optimising for ‘beef butchers’ versus optimising for ‘beef butchers Blackpool.’

Search algorithms are based on competitive chaos; we set a rule for one keyword and that rule changes based on the competiveness of that keyword. However, for most local search marketing phrases (ones which include the location of the business or the market) the phrases tend to be more long-tail focused. This means that they are less competitive and are less likely to have complicated rules attached to them. This is explained by a leading expert who said:

“That explains why long tail, less competitive keywords are easier to rank – less chaos,”

 Also, search engines are not translators so they should target their keywords for each market. Websites are categorised into sections and markets so they can be placed into the correct searches. The search engines will also search for websites who have deliberately targeted phrases not associated with the search phrase and rank them lower. This is what local search marketing techniques try to beat in order to get the site towards the top of the organic search results. Local search marketing tends to work better in comparison to standard search marketing, due to the long-tail aspect we discussed earlier.

Small to medium sized businesses need to implement a local search marketing aspect to their marketing strategies in order to maximise the potential from their firm. This is done in a variety of ways; one of these includes choosing the correct and relevant keywords to optimise.