If you want to optimize your website, taking advantage of local SEO can benefit you in many ways.
By optimizing your site for a specific area, rather than a more global market place, you eliminate global competition, you can target a specific niche, and in many cases you’ll attract people to your site that are ready to make a purchase.
If you are in a highly competitive niche, this is one way to gain ground, especially in the search engines, where you’ll be able to gather traffic. Here are some tips to optimize your website for localised SEO results.
Keyword Research
Take the time to find the right keywords to use. You need to go above and beyond basic words when you optimize for a specific area. This narrows your competition and increases your relevancy to local web surfers.
In many cases, long tail keyword searches are what people who have a good idea of what they want use. People will search for phrases that indicate strong choices, such as words with “best” or words with “affordable”, or words that dictate buying, such as “buy” or “online”. Add in a geographical element, and you could cater to someone looking to buy the best product (for their needs) online right now.
Invest time and if necessary, money, into keyword research that can help you determine what words and phrases to use in your titles, anchor text, web copy, and even in pay per click campaigns.
Off Page Local SEO
Use more than just keyword phrases to help you benefit from local SEO. Set up online profiles for local directories, join local marketing groups, and market with your target demographic in mind.
Where possible, link to your website from sites that target your local geographic, as this, too, will help Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines see your site as relevant to a specific geographic and demographic.
Local Content
A great way to gain attention of search engines and of the people in the area you’re targeting is to target your content to that local area. If you’re targeting a specific area, write about things that are important to that audience.
Write about things that relate to them. Think about what might help them save time, save money, be happier, etc. Know your demographic is good advice but so is “know your geographic.”
When considering local SEO, you may not want to target just one location, but focusing on an area at a time could help you dominate search engines, get website traffic that converts, and this could help you develop a strategy to broaden your reach later on.
About Sean Rasmussen
Sean,
I don’t think I’ve ever been the first to comment, so this is pretty exciting.
When you talk about local SEO tips, it reminds me of the blog you built called Melbourne Pizza Deliveries. Is this the sort of thing you mean when talking about optimising your site for a specific area, rather than a global market place?
When you invest time and if necessary, money, into keyword research that can help you determine what words and phrases to use in your titles etc, where or who are you buying your keyword research from?
Cath
Yes Cathy, Melbourne Pizza Delivery is a classic example of targeting a local market. Using the location in your domain name, mentioning the location within your content and having the .com.au URL are all methods (and just some) of SEO targeting a particular area
Hi Sean,
Targeting Local Traffic on a competitive global niche is something I’ve pondered about for a while now. To my way of thinking, being more location specific would help reduce some of the competition, and perhaps open up niches which may be very difficult to rank highly on the global scene, as you have mentioned.
I am beginning to trial this theory with a domain name I bought recently, aiming to target local traffic with LT Keywords, which are lucrative and thus competitive on the global scene, hoping to reduce the competition and rank highly for those Keywords on a local basis.
So it will be interesting to see how this one pans out.
Interesting indeed Cade, I’m looking forward to hearing of your results
This is one of the first things I learnt about seo. If you are promoting real estate in Surry Hills fo example, you have a huge opportunity to really do some local SEO to help bring the people of Surry Hills into your office. These are simple but very effective strategies.
Good example Jackie.
I learn’t many of the concepts of the local SEO while watching the SEO case study for Melbourne Pizza Delivery. While I have applied some of that knowledge, I know that there is so much more that can be done.
What a great idea Cade. My niche is targeted worldwide as well but maybe if I conquer one country at a time, I may have more success.
Some great tips for optimising for local SEO. I can think of many products that have a local “flavour” that might well be worth investigating with the idea of targeting the local market.
Thanks for the local Seo tips Sean,
This question actually came up in a forum the other day where an internet marketing beginner asked how to optimize a website to target people in New Zealand where we are from & I think the end result was to use a .co.nz domain which at the time I thought may not be the best answer. I seems that using keyword optimization & link strategies could be a better way to go.
Another attraction for doing this may be that people would prefer ‘local’ as they can get recourse more easily if there is an issue with delivery or a problem and so on.
I wonder too if ‘time’ should be targeted – e.g. for PPC? Having ads displayed when folks are asleep seems to me a waste of time.
‘Time’ certainly can play a big part in the success of a PPC campaign Peter. This is one of the reasons people need to test and measure their campaigns for most effective use
Hi Sean,
This article is very heplful. The niche I am concentrating on right now is not suited for a global market so I can take advantage of local SEO.
My target market is in Sydney to begin with so I can optimize for this specific area. I can see the sense in keyword research being different when marketing local than to all of Australia (which I will do at a later date) Who knows I may find a market for the niche worldwide as well.
It’s a great tip to take your geographic target area into account. Using your location in your seo strategy will definitely help to get people who are searching locally to your site and through your door.
And where is the sense of targeting a world wide audience if you only deliver in a limited area?
Hi Sean,
Thanks for the local SEO tips. I can definitely see where this can come in handy. Especially if you have a product that only suits a particular geographic location and you’re still marketing it globally.
These tips will really help with choosing the right long tail keywords to target your local market.
So much of what I have been doing has been targetting an American audience and “pretending” to be American. I am learning a strategy (and after reading this post on Local SEO Tips) will be investigating that very soon!
This is an area I need to really learn more in, SEO as it is very important in order to get the rankings I will need to have a very successful business.
Need to try this kind of Local SEO tricks.