Marketing a Local Business on the Internet

When you’re trying to promote your business through local search online, there are several different components that you can combine in order to create the overall most effective strategy. Performance in local search is going to be achieved by combining several different elements.

Building Listings and Links

When you’re trying to get your site to perform better in the local search results, you need to split your work between your own site and other sites. For example, things that you can do on other sites which can help to improve the results of your own pages include:

• Building place listings or citations that include your address, contact information, and phone number in a consistent fashion. For example the business below provides SEO services to businesses in Chicago, and this is their citation:

• Build links back from other sites to your own page. Remember that when building links, even when focussing on local search rather than simple, overall SEO performance, that the quality of the links is more important than sheer quantity
• Build content which helps to showcase the knowledge that your company has. This builds brand trust whether you’re offering a product or a service. Video content is now shared in so many ways through sharing sites, cell phones, and social media sites, that this can be one of your best ways of creating content. Search engines are also putting more emphasis on great content, increasing the importance of video all the time.

Working on Your Site

There also things that you have to concentrate on that more closely involve your own site and this creates the other half of your total marketing plan for local search results.

• Build an email list. Although these have traditionally been used for direct sales for websites, this may be an overused tactic that no longer breeds trust. Instead, think of using it as a tool for building a relationship by communicating with your customers.
• Ensure that all of your contact information is listed completely on your website, including your address and phone number.
• Work on the onsite optimization factors, targeting local keywords. This could account for up to 30% of your site’s performance in the search engines.
• Driving paid traffic to your site. Using pay per click marketing is an important part of the overall toolkit that people use to drive traffic to their site. This can be an easy way to lose money unless you do your research first however, so be sure to take the time to do your homework before delving into PPC.