Local Internet marketing methods such as SEO, PPC, and email marketing canbe effective for advertising local businesses that are looking to attract morecustomers at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. But first you need tomake sure that your local business can be easily found in an online search.
When a prospective customer types in “florist shops + 20003″ to find a floristin the Capitol Hill area of Washington, D.C. your business should appear inthe search results. In order for your site to show up you must include all of thevarious geographic keywords that local searchers would use to locate yourbusiness.
•Make sure that your store’s full business name, address, phone numberand email address appear on your website’s main page in HTML text.
•Include in your site’s meta data tags and title tag descriptors suchas, “Smith’s Flowers in Washington, D.C.” or Smith’s Flowers, Capitol Hill,Washington, D.C.”
•Do a few test searches in the big search engines to see how yourbusiness appears and if the information is accurate, and add your site if itdoes not come up at all.
•Make sure that your site is listed in the following online local directoriesaccurately:
yellowpages.com
superpages.com
switchboard.com
http://www.bing.com/maps
maps.google.com
local.yahoo.com
The key to local search engine optimization is to stake out your position in thetop ten search engine results for your keywords. If you are not focusing onimplementing local Internet marketing strategies, you are losing out on leads andcustomers and leaving money on the table.
Tags: Capitol Hill, HTML, PPC, Smith Flowers
