Local SEO for Your Region

When you’re working for local businesses in your area, you are going to sell your services to them based on a number of factors, including your facility with various types of marketing on the web. One area that you’re going to want to place particular emphasis on is local business SEO. Make businesses realize that your efforts aren’t just about driving people to a website, but about actually getting customers in their door.

Local SEO is the one area of web marketing where local businesses can gain the most. Unless a company plans on selling the majority of their products long distance online, getting huge traffic numbers to a website realistically isn’t going to do them a lot of good. What is going to be practical for them is to capture a large portion of the searchers who are looking for a business that offers their product or service in their particular region.

Imagine that a person is on the internet looking for a car dealership. They aren’t simply going to search for car dealerships, as to a person in Chicago; a car dealership in Buffalo is of absolutely no use. Instead, they are going to want to have results returned to them for car dealerships in their local area. They may search for a car dealership in Chicago instead, or they might simply take advantage of the way that Google tries to personalize searches to the geographic region that the searchers is located in. In either case, local SEO efforts for a car dealership in Chicago could make sure that their business is one of the first that these theoretical searchers lay eyes on.

Local SEO is seen by many as the new wave in promotion of local businesses. One thing is for certain, and that is that if a business isn’t trying to make at least some inroads into SEO, they will be watching far more customers walking through their competitors doors than through their own. That said, what are some ways to start making headway in the local SEO area?

First of all, local directories of businesses are very important to focus on when pursuing better local SEO rankings. These are things like local Yellow Pages or possibly local or community business associations. These types of pages rank very well in Google for searches relating to businesses in that area. Therefore, their link back to a website is going to count for a great deal in Google’s eyes, which will improve the rankings of a site in a local search.

The website of the business itself can also be optimized for local SEO. One of the things which is very important is that a full address, as well as a phone number with an area code be listed in the text of the site so that Google can index it. Usually, most people do this by including a “contact us” page of some kind that lists all of the relevant contact details that a company has. Some people also choose to include that information on every single page by putting it in a header or footer. This is not only good for local SEO, but also lets visitors find out how to contact you without clicking on another link. Any time you can minimize the number of steps that a customer has to take to get the information they want on a website, it is a good thing.

Remember that local SEO can take some time, but that the effects will build like a snowball. Every step that you take towards achieving higher rankings for local search will build upon the step before it.

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