Orlando Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing Tips For Local Businesses

By Ryan Frank

Organic, local search engine optimization is the best way for your business to gain visibility in your local market and significantly increase your sales. The following are just a few simple search engine marketing tips that will help your local business raise its rank in local search engine listings.

Local Directories

Start by submitting your website link to the local chamber of commerce and your local Better Business Bureau. Getting listed in local directories is the basic foundation for building links, driving traffic to your website, and thus increasing your business. Google Local Business Center lists local businesses for free, so take advantage of this. The majority of internet users today use Google and Google Maps to find local businesses when they need a particular product or service. Yahoo! offers free local business directories. Other well trafficked local directories include CitySearch and TrueLocal.

Leveraging Domain Trust

It takes a while for new domains to gain high rankings on Google. You need to drive a lot of traffic to your site first before you gain a search engine’s trust. So while you’re building up your domain’s trust, you can list your business in a sub-domain of an already trusted website that lists local businesses. You pay a monthly hosting fee, but it is well worth it, as it guarantees a certain amount of traffic and you can include a link to your main site in your sub-domain.

Make Your Address Easy to Find

When you’re building your website, make sure that your address is easily visible in several, if not all, of your web pages. Any blog, social networking profile or sub domain you have should also list your local address prominently so that people will always know exactly where to find you.

Targeting Multiple Local Markets

If you are targeting multiple local markets, make sure to create in your website a separate web page for each town. Use keywords that target the largest town in your page, but don’t include multiple towns in the same page. If you do multiple towns per page, visitors will see your website as less relevant to their market than if they see a page just for their town.

PPC

A pay-per-click ad campaign can be a great way to test what keywords are best to target in your efforts to drive traffic from your local market to your site. Google, Yahoo! and MSN offer PPC advertising. You also want to post PPC ads on websites that are relevant to your local target community. If you are targeting multiple towns, make sure to create a well-made, unique PPC ad for each of them.