SEO Musts for Local Business
The Internet might be global in nature, but if your business is local, it makes no sense to concentrate on global reach, when your customers live in your city, or even in your neighborhood.
For local businesses getting a global reach is a waste of resources.
Instead, you should concentrate on the local community.
You might be asking how you can do it, when the Web is global and Google doesn't classify sites according to their location. Here is how you can go local with SEO:
1 Use your location in your keywords.
The first trick is to use your location in your keywords.
For example, if you are in London and you sell car insurance, your most important keyphrase should be "car insurance London" because this keyphrase contains your business and your location and will drive people who are looking for car insurance in London in particular.
Further do keyword research.Keywords are the basis of any SEO campaign and even if you are an expert in your niche, you should always research keywords simply because users frequently search for quite unexpected keywords and keyphrases you as an expert will never think of.
Needless to say, what matters most for high rankings is which keywords your target audience is searching for, not which keywords you as an expert think are most popular in a particular niche
2 Use your location in metatags
Metatags matter for search engines and you shouldn't miss to include your location, together with your other keywords in the metatags of the pages of your site.
Of course, you must have your location in the keywords you use in the body text because otherwise it is a bit suspicious when your body text doesn't have your location as a keyword but your tags are stuffed with it.
Also target the geo-specific keywords with exceptionally good conversion rates.
3 Use your location in your body text
Keywords in the body text count a lot and you can't afford to skip them. If your web copy is optimized for "car insurance" only, this won't help you rank well with "car insurance London", so make sure that your location is part of your keywords.
4 Take advantage of Google Places and Yahoo Local
Google Places and Yahoo Local are great places to submit to because they will include you in their listings for a particular location.
5 Create backlinks with your location as anchor text
It could be a bit tricky to get organic backlinks with your location as anchor text because some keywords with location don't sound very natural – for instance, "car insurance London" isn't grammatically correct and you will hardly get an organic inline link with it but you can use it in the Name field to comment on blogs. If the blog is dofollow, you will still get a backlink with anchor text that helps for SEO.
6 Get included in local search engine
Global search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo can bring you lots of traffic but depending on your location, local search engines might be the real golden mine. A local search engine could mean a search engine for the area (though it is not very likely to have regional search engines) or more likely for your country. For instance, Baidu is a great option, if you are selling on the Chinese market.
7 Get listed in local directories
In addition to local search engines, you need to try your luck with local directories, too. You might think that nobody reads directory listings but this isn't exactly so. For instance, Yellow Pages are one of the first places where people look when searching for a local vendor for a particular product.
8 Run locally-targeted ad campaigns
One of the most efficient ways to drive targeted, local traffic to your site is with the help of locally-targeted ad campaigns. PPC ads and classifieds are the two options that work best – at least for most webmasters.
If you need to hire hep from outside, engage the best SEO Company for the SEO of your web property. Do a reference check on teh SEO work done by tehse companies and ensure fully taht they are equipped with the right techniques to get you the best search engine rankings.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/seo-musts-for-local-business-5330652.html
About the AuthorCletus has been trained by the best SEO company in Mumbai. He has the expertise of the right techniques to get you the best search engine rankings.
