Local business Internet marketing is ever changing, as Google’s algorithm is ever changing and the way they treat local businesses in the SERPs is constantly something that people in the local business Internet marketing industry must keep up with.
The thing about link building for local sites, is that you don’t need as many to compete as you would for a site that is relevant on a national basis, but the links are usually a lot harder to come by because they are specific to a region – and yet the way Google treats links is always changing as well. It is cost effective to outsource your links to a company that provides a link building service as you don’t need many, but they can be tricky to get.
Some things will always be changing but some things will always stay the same. Here are three onsite techniques Local businesses can use to help with SEO.
Proper (and Tricky) Keyword Placement
The “h1″ tags are a very critical part of your local business SEO. You want to make sure that they have: 1) The main city you operate out of and 2) the main service or product you are trying to promote – inside of them.
Sometimes that doesn’t work with the flow of you web site. However that is fine, and not to worry about, even if it does work with the flow of your web site, there are is a very unique way of using these h1 tags that can tremendously help with SEO.
The first couple words that Google reads off of your web site are very important. Take a look at this Detroit roofing web site. What do you notice in the top right corner? That’s an h1 tag with the desired keyword phrase sitting right there at the top of the page so it is the first thing that Google sees. At the time this article was written, it currently ranks number one for the phrase “Detroit Roofing” and is consistently in the top 3. This is not a coincidence. The h1 tag does miracles for this website.
A Page for Each and Every City and Service Combination
Local search is a frontier that is being quickly gobbled up by Internet marketing entrepreneurs, but ranking for small cities will always be easy as the competition will be quite like it is for cities like Chicago and Detroit.
Take a look at paintingcontractorUSA.com. This website is simple, yet it ranks on the 1st page of the SERPs for many city, county, state combinations all over the nation (it even ranks on the first page for the term painting contractor).
It doesn’t have a page for every single combination – it has a few – but it gives Google a chance to credit them with area specific services with the tool on the bottom of the home page: A simple dropdown bar that names all of the cities and services that the company can provide. Google loves sites like that use strategies like these, and will reward sites that do in the search engines.
What Domain Name to Use
Brand-ability. That’s what Matt Cutts (top search engineer for Google) wants people to use. He wants people to steer away from exact match domains.
Why? – Did you notice something about the two examples I gave you? They both have exact match domains. That’s because they have a huge advantage for ranking, especially in the local market when links and social media do not play as big as a role as they do in other niches. A good strategy to use is to have not only one website, but many website to promote your business. Get the best out of your brand-able domain name, and then build a website for the top search queries – the ones that will benefit your business the most – using those search queries as your domain name.
Using a combination of these three tactics will help you tremendously in the SERPs, and you can see results quickly with not more than a week’s worth of work.
This article was written by Anthony Benedict. Anthony helps to run and maintain inetzeal.com – which is an internet marketing company that provides a white label SEO service.
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