It is completely obvious that search engine optimization plays an important role in ranking organically in the search engines. Often, though, businesses completely miss their target audience because the focus remains on broad-based keywords and not local keywords. This is detrimental if the target market for a business is local or regional particularly because broad keyword are essentially national or international level keywords.
When doing business in, say, Beaverton, Oregon, as a retail store, why on earth would you focus marketing at a national level? You wouldn’t, and that’s the point. Therefore, in creating a website, web-marketing efforts would go to defining specific products and services that are targeted to local consumers.
Enter local SEO.
It is very well known that keywords play a huge role in optimizing a website, but what is often missed is localizing keywords and the other back-end aspects of a website.
There is much that goes into localizing a website on a large scale, but the first step is to have a local address. If the business has a local address, then it’s time to begin optimizing the website.
Contact Information
This is vital to localization. Make sure the address and phone number of the business is at the footer of every single page. This will help the search engines determine where the business is, thus localizing the business to a specific area.Title Tag
Use the city and state in the title tags when writing in the content management system. Instead of writing a title tag to say [Small Business Marketing Solutions] it would now be changed to [Small Business Marketing Solutions for Beaverton, Oregon Businesses].Meta Description
Similar to the Title Tag, the description should be written with a local area in mind if the business is targeting a specified area. An example is something like [Brandon Laws provides small businesses in Beaverton, Oregon with the tools needed to optimize their business website at a local level].Body Text
The body text is extremely important due to the fact that it is the most visible to visitors browsing the website. So, not only is it good for the search engines to link the content/website to a specific location, it’s great for human visitors to understand where the business is at relative to them.Google Places & Other Directories
This is technically an off-page SEO strategy since it’s not something directly on the website, but you can create business listings on all sorts of directory websites. A couple of the biggies are Google Places, Yelp, Merchant Circle, Bing Local and Yellow Pages. Since the directories are all address, URL and phone number driven, this is a perfect spot to let the search engines know where the business is and it will begin to associate specific keywords with the location.
By using broad-based keywords, a business website essentially goes up against the big players in the industry, the ones soaking up all the high-trafficked keywords; however, if you can localize a keyword, you target a smaller market and a high-value visitor that is better suited for your business.