When we hear the word “local” we usually think that efforts are considerably less and some people even feel that it doesn’t take a whole lot of thinking to attract customers on the Web if the scope is only local, or limited to a particular geographic location or a set of towns or cities.
As someone who has been helping Phoenix businesses with local SEO marketing for years now, let me tell you: the effort is nearly the same. The process of getting clicks, views and keeping customers on the page for longer and longer periods of time is the same, also.
So if you’re serious about growing your business and your website for the purpose of marketing to a particular location, you need to approach local SEO marketing seriously.
How do you do this? Start with getting a SEO expert onboard. If you’re thinking that you will get all of the factors down pat on the first attempt, you’re in a for a disappointment.
The way the search engines are working now, getting ranked on the first page of a search engine like Google has now become a fine science.
More than ten years ago, all webmasters were doing were farming links and stuffing their websites with collections of keywords and they would get what they wanted – high rankings on Google.
But now it’s different. Google and other search engines have defied the trend and have redesigned the process so that search results will be focused on natural language and content.
This posed both a problem and a solution to the businesses: you need natural language content for your website in order to stay relevant.
But that’s not all. The structure of a website is just as important: you need to make sure that meta titles, headings, tags and object descriptions are also relevant to the market that you want to penetrate. And with competition from other businesses who have also realized that they need to attract more business online, the task is really for a company that specializes in search engine optimization.
Another misconception that people have about search engine optimization is that each campaign is identical and you can get away with a ‘cookie cutter approach’ to both on-page and off-page optimization.
This is largely not true and here’s why: if we go back to the basics (product-selling website versus services website) then we are already looking at two very different ballfields, each with their own rules.
Local campaigns also require a certain balance of social media presence, backlinks, map listings, etc. Why? Because people who are looking for a local business expect lots of familiar elements when they locate your website on the Web.
They need to be hooked in by this sense of being anchored to a certain place. This can be projected effectively, but through different platforms and techniques. The SEO agency has to go through the entire map to understand how to position your business and create a local campaign that will work the moment you press the button. And that’s how local SEO marketing really works.