A Powerful Tactic For Your Online Marketing Goals
As a first post to my new blog, I would like to share with you a tactic that works for many clients of mine in helping them gain more expose online. This tactic doesn’t work well for everyone, but if you operate a bricks and mortar business it is something that should not be over looked.
The tactic? Local search marketing!
The search engines are slowly putting more and more emphasis on bringing relevant local results to users when they search for products and services based on their search query ( city or state + term ) and IP location when they made the query. The big 3 ( Google, Yahoo, and MSN ) have already been doing this for some time and with the advent of Google making personalization a permanent feature when using their search engine, you will find more and more users of Google getting exposed to localized results automatically as most users will have already done a few local search queries that will be stored in their personal search history.
With more and more exposure to map services and mobile phone services provided by the big 3 ( think Google 411 and Maps along with MSN and Yahoo Maps ), getting your online presence into local search results just makes sense. Not only will these results show up in the Local versions of the search engines, but in their main index listings too.
Web surfers are even turning to specialized local search providers like online yellow pages, TrueLocal, JudysBook, and more for their local search results. Many services like Yahoo Local allow surfers to rank and review services from companies to help better filter business listings and services.
Currently, I submit my clients to over 60+ local submission services to ensure they get indexed for the proper localities and terms they are seeking. The big 3 get most of their information from 3rd party services as well as their own submissions for local search inclusion. Don’t stop at just submitting your local data to Google in Google Local, go the extra mile and submit it to other local services as Google, Yahoo, and MSN all verify and use 3rd party information to verify their results. The more times they find your information for “Louisville Search Engine Marketing” on other sites, the more likely they are to rank you higher for those queries when someone types that in.
Ranking for a local term might not bring in a ton of traffic compared to the same generic ( non localized ) term, but you will be finding better quality, targeted visitors looking for your products and services.
Think about it.. if you were a web surfer looking for a dentist to perform a cleaning on your teeth, wouldn’t you search for a local dentist ( example “Louisville Family Dentist” ) rather than searching for just “Family Dentist” in Google? The traffic might be a lot lower, but then again you are getting better quality leads that will actually convert for you in the end, raising your conversion rate in the process.
You can extend this idea to pay per click marketing ( Adwords and Overture ) and other areas as well. Never stop thinking about how to use this tactic to your advantage. The market for local terms is smaller and less competitive compared to general terms, but that loop is closing faster and faster every day as the larger competitors are catching on and hogging up the results. If you don’t believe me, just do a search for any local real estate term like “Louisville Real Estate” or “Louisville Homes for Sale” in Google. Sure there are some local companies and agents listed, but you will find several non-local companies with local results, like Trulia.
Bottom line, get in local search results now before it becomes overcrowded by the larger companies and dominates the search engine results.