With newspapers are going out of business left and right. Consumers are rarely turning to the yellow pages anymore. The internet has put the power in the hands of the consumer by allowing a consumer to adequately research a product or service before choosing to buy. The internet has surpassed print media as a venue for conducting business even on a local level.
The internet has become a very strong vehicle for small and medium sized businesses to market and build their profit. As consumer behavior trends more and more to the virtual marketplace, it is more vital than ever to create an online business presence. This can be done through traditional SEO or SEM. However, there are billions of websites out there. How can a business hope to compete in the sea of competing websites?
Step one is building the website, which is like cooking a meal. Step two is getting that website noticed on the internet through local SEO or SEM strategies. This is like taking the meal and serving it to your guests (or customers!)
SEO is basically getting your website to rank higher on the search engine results. The higher it ranks, the more traffic and visibility it is going to receive. SEO is a smart move for any business with a website. Having a website without any sort of SEO effort is almost pointless. The phrase “If I build it, they will come” does not apply to websites! You must take an active role in getting your website seen, and SEO can provide a virtual avalanche of traffic depending on your market.
Getting your website optimized for the search engines is a matter of making sure you have the right keywords in your meta tags, your title tags, your domain name, all your relevant URLs, as well as sprinkled throughout the text on your website. This needs to be done to every page on your website. You also need to make sure you have an adequate sitemap loaded onto your site as well.
Even more important is the aspect of building keyword loaded, descriptive anchor text links that point back to your website. This helps tell the search engines what your website is about. Ways to build these links includes submitting your website to more search engines, online directories, blog comments, forum posts with a link in your signature, online article directories with your link in your author box, creating web 2.0 properties that describe your business, submitting online press releases, or even creating profiles on various social sites with anchor text links pointing back to your website.
Search engines will send out little robots or spiders that crawl the internet and create an index of how to organize those websites based on what the search engine thinks is the most relevant to the keywords in the search query.
So which keywords are best? This may actually be the good news for local businesses. If you are a chiropractor in Bozeman, Montana for example, you would not want to target the keyword “chiropractor”. It is way to competitive, first of all, and second of all, you don’t want people in New Jersey looking at your website in the first place. So targeting local keywords that contain either a town or city name, a ZIP code or other qualifying information is very important for getting targeted traffic, plus it is also much less competitive. In fact, it is one of the largest untapped markets online, and will continue to be for quite a while.
Now has become the time to move ahead with any sort of search engine marketing for your local business. You will not only get ahead of your competition, but you will stay there for quite a while making them catch up to you.