Four Rules for Local SEO Marketing

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Internet marketing, despite being a massively lucrative industry, is not particularly old. While the internet was developed and released on a mass scale to the public in the early 1990s, today’s major internet marketing methods did not develop until close to the turn of the millennium. Affiliate programs popped up in the late 1990s, search engines developed and hit their current value early in the 2000s, and the vast majority of CPA-based programs only started development within the last five years.

Despite this relatively lack of age, internet marketing has developed incredibly within the last ten years, particularly when it comes to SEO. The initial big wins for SEO practitioners were major terms, particularly highly valuable keywords. However, the major winners amongst SEO practitioners today aren’t mass-searched terms, but valuable local and regional keyword matches.

With more and more SEOs looking to establish a presence in local search listings, it has become increasingly important to follow strategies and best practices for local ranking. These rules won’t push a business to the top of the local search results immediately, but they will certainly help businesses boost their rankings and become more visible.

1. Pick terms based on value, not just search frequency.
‘Cheap products’ might get 10,000 searches per month, but that does not mean it’s worth more than ‘high-end products’ at 7,000 searches per month. The best way to market locally is to pick search terms that are valuable to your business, not just your website’s traffic statistics.

2. Make sure you get a Google Maps listing too.
How good would it be to have not just one, but two local listings in your search results? Rather than spending all your time on acquiring a top-ranked search result, it is best to split time evenly between acquiring a visible search result and ranking for a local map result. Set up a Google Maps presence for your business and you will see increased traffic from two different search sources, not just one.

3. Aim for regional ranks, not just local.
It is certainly valuable to become the default search result for your city, but it is even more valuable to become the default search result for your county, province, or even state! With the right degree of keyword targeting and link generation research, you can master regional ranks and local ranks at the same time, vastly increasing your market size.

4. Test your SEO value with in-store signals.
It is one thing to predict your SEO value, but it is another to actually test it out. Why not offer a special 5% discount for online customers, just to see how many customers or clients actually discover your business online? With a quick addition to your website’s homepage, you could have a foolproof in-store SEO checking scheme, ready to analyze and record the value of your SEO campaigns.