Local SEO| 9 Tips to Dominate Your Local Competitors Online

by Prejushya Kalicharan - 2/25/2013 10729 Views

Local Internet Marketing is trending among local vendors and so is the demand for Local SEO services

Local SEO If you are ready to market your local business online, it’s very essential that you consider certain important factors that help you gain online visibility easier & at a faster rate. Promoting your business & its location over all possible local online channels help you grab the attention of those internet users who are very much in need of your service. Most of the internet users make use of search engines like Google, Bing/Yahoo to locate local service providers like plumbers, carpenters, welders, dentists, florists & so many other small businesses…

Let’s get deep into it:

1. Keyword Selection

A best chosen keyword leaves you with half the SEO job done. It’s not always affordable & possible for a computer hardware repair service provider who seeks for Local clients to rank for the keyword “pc repair”. The local monthly search data for this high-competitive keyword is 33,100. Then doesn’t he deserve to rank top for his business-related-keywords? Yes of Course, he has the chance & now has got a better opportunity than that of the previous one. Long tailed location specific keywords.

When he adds a short tail to his niche keyword, the number of local monthly searches jumps down to hit an achievable, yet competitive rate. Can u see the competition variance, below?

KEYWORD SELECTION SEO

Setting a long tail keyword specifying your business location is the prime key to Local SEO victory. Hence opt for keywords which best describe your business, and those which also converts. Writing a compelling associated with a wise keyword selection go hand in hand.

Search for your business website’s keywords over Google Adwords and analyze the competition.

2.Knowledge about the market at your location

Market research and analysis are an integral part of any business and your goals should be realistic & achievable.

MARKET RESEARCH LOCAL SEO

A start-up should identify who your local clients are and continuously research on ideas to reach them. Whereas, a well-established business should eye on ways to expand & establishing new branch offices over other targeted demographic locations.

A business should always pay attention to evolving marketing needs & requirement of their customers. Competitor analysis is incredible for Local Internet Marketing and this determines how effective or ineffective you are concerned with the online market. Why don’t you try talking to your competitor’s customers?

3.Website Optimization focusing Local

Showcase before your website’s visitors the locations you serve, which helps them take ONPAGE SEO LOCAL quick decisions & avoids unwanted time lapse. Try to have your city name, province & business name incorporated into the webpage URL. Try to wisely include location into your Meta content, Header tags and content. Include the address you use for Local SEO promotion along with your contact phone number in each and every page of your website, if possible. Generate a Geo Site Map over Google, upload them over your website’s root folder & finally add it into Google’s webmaster tools. This way, Google will get instructed on where your business is located and shares the information with its users.

ONPAGE SEO LOCAL SEO

Page loading speed, domain authority, & page aauthority of landing pages are the other On-page factors affecting a website’s conversion rate. Creating a genuine testimonial column for your website helps you gain the trust of visitors & increases sales.

4.Social media sites

Targeting your local clients requires reach, and this message OR reach is easily attained by means of social media sites. Unsaturated engagement & regular updates on your business gains you many fans & fan-sharing. “Word of mouth” message spread is easily possible by means of dedicated social media site-handling.

SOCIAL MEDIA ONPAGE SEO

Actively engage with your fans/followers. Alert them with a post regarding any special offers that you plan for your products or services, and openly ask them for referrals to their family, pals OR colleagues. Also, never restrict your social focus on Google plus. Share your time on Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn & Pinterest to gain more clients locally. Display the social icons over your website visibly, so that visitor click through them to know how great your fan-base & engagement is. Build great Branding for sales surge. Concentrate more on advertising your company, the location & contact details over Facebook Company page, Twitter for Business, LinkedIn “Companies” & Google plus Business Page. Favor & help your fans to transform them into your clients.

5.Infographics & Pinterest for Local Business Marketing

Images speak more than words/writing. We are aware of that, and the same applies in case of Infographics combined with Pinterest promotion. But why Pinterest? Within a very short period of time Pinterest topped & expelled the other top online image displaying sites like Picasa, Fotki & Flickr. So why don’t you draw what you need to tell your clients in form of an Infographic & market it via the much viable & viral Pinterest medium? Also don’t stop doing this just once & stay idle, for an extended reach you need to actively engage yourself into a particular task.

6.Don’t stuff your keywords & post fake reviews

KEYWORD STUFFING SEO

Too much is always good for nothing. You might get hit hard with Google algorithm updates in case you over optimize or keyword stuff your website’s content. Check for over optimization of content using reliable & popular free/ paid SEO tools. Approach an SEO vendor who pays attention to bringing your website to the top of search engines, rather striving hard to apply each of their default SEO techniques to your site. Each website & each business is different, and hence each one needs a special attention & treatment.

Some website owners wish to link all their sub-page anchor texts pointing to their home-page. When Google detects this, your homepage gets de-indexed & you will never be able to see traffic to your site after that, unless you take huge pain to get them back into form, which is again a cat-on-the wall effort.

Similarly, is the fake review postings done on a business. A website should look worth the rating & reviews posted on it. A fake review never originates from a real name, rather adjusting with much obvious fake names like 'flowerpot007jj'. Also the tone of the review also matters. Review posts like, “I have used 'XYZ' services and they were too good that I will approach them for business the next time too.” How do you guess that someone will get back to you seeing this review comment & a five-star rating nearby? A testimonial should detail the factor behind a person liking the service/product. Don’t fall prey to fake-review writers.

7.Schedule Meet-Ups with your local people

REFERRALS LOCAL SEO Call upon your local people for an informal get-together & educate them on how you & your business would benefit them. This helps to increase trust & ownership on your business over them. Invite your old clients, present ones & all those partners who help you survive I business. Show them statistics of how you have improved these days & how your clients have benefitted. Help & serve them to reap more leads in return.

Ask your clients for referrals and make them rejoice with an exclusive offer or a surprise gift in return.

8.Citations

citations local seo Citations are mentions of your business with/without contact details & call to actions over the web. The plot may vary as per the amount of details we furnish. Local businesses which lack a website highly benefit out of these citations. Mentions of a business over yellow pages or local directories, along with a phone number will be more than enough to drive in sales leads, once you don’t have website. Those small businesses which have a website benefit twice as much than that of those which don’t. A backlink from the cited location earns more site visits & higher will be the rate of conversion.

Please remember to feature the same address of your website over the citations also. This increases authenticity & chances of search engines indexing & considering your website as genuine among others.

9.Video Making & Marketing

You need not outsource your small business to an ad agency which charges you six & seven digit? fee for an ad work done on your business.

viral video seo

Instead, you can prepare small, inexpensive videos yourselves on your business emphasizing your purpose, quality service & customer handling method. The video should be more like a one-on-one interaction with each of your future clients at your local places. Video promotion can be done free of cost & youcan also advert & publish the same over all possible places around the web.

Note that your video should pierce your target audience & make them try your service once. Remember to monitor comments & respond back to their queries & also thank them for positive feedbacks. Optimize your video description, title & keywords for your location & main keyword. Controversial is always going viral & try to make your video way different & unexpected from that of your competitors in the industry. This way you and your business get noted as your video may attain the viral status. Think Out Of The Box!

Listen to this presentation by Kevin Allocca, YouTube’s trends manager, at the TEDYouth event.

Hope you found the information useful. Please POST your valuable comments below.

Category :

SEO News

Tags :

Local SEO, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO services, keyword se

About Prejushya Kalicharan

SEO is a challenging field and I try my best to surpass this challenging environment which is unconditionally filled with opportunities, knowledge building and problem solving. I pursue what I .... more info about the author