There is a large portion of the online advertising market that has been neglected, and that is small local businesses. Often local SEO campaigns don’t bring in quite as much traffic as a campaign that targets a broad global audience, but in many cases this is really not an issue as most local business have no intention to market their services globally. For the local business owner, their buyers are typically in particular geographic radius. This is especially the case for services like auto body shops, window installers and similar businesses.
Unlike campaigns that go after global markets and broad keywords, local markets are often less saturated, thus making it easier to go after long tail keywords that feature a city name. Take the term freelance for example. Doing a Google search for “freelance” brings back 75,200,000 results where as a term like “Spokane freelance” returns about 431 results. Competing against 431 results is much more of a level playing field as compared to competing against 75,200,000. Given this insight, it’s pretty easy to see why going after a local market is a great starting place for business that serve a specific local demographic.
Taking advantage of just a few local based services can push your site up in the search engine rankings as well as provide some valuable back links to your website. There is a new type of service emerging on the web often labeled as Local Social or Check-in services. This category of service is made up of websites and applications like Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook Places and many others. Such services facilitate sharing with your friends and acquaintances–the type of businesses you frequent. Many of these services also facilitate the collection of points, and prizes for patrons that are top spenders. Implementing this type of service into your local business can really revolutionize the way you track the patrons that are top spenders as well as implement loyalty programs. Though these services started out being used in the restaurant businesses, more and more business are taking advantage of the visibility that such services provide.
Other services that lend themselves well to local business are services like Google’s local business center, Bing’s local listing center, and other similar services. These services allow you to add information such as maps, images, descriptions and reviews to your business and positions them in the search engine for local search queries.
With the change in the economy there is a new emergence of small businesses, freelancers and entrepreneurs, and with that comes the need for localized advertising. A targeted local SEO campaign can have a significant impact on a local businesses visibility as well as increase revenue. Now is the time to develop a strong local presence online before your competitors catch on and follow suit.
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