Local Search and ideas to implement it into your Search Engine Strategies
A great way to get more targeted traffic to your website is through implementing a local search campaign. What is local search? If you are a website selling product in Arizona, then how nice would it be to come up on top of the search engines for all the people that type in your keyword or phrase in Arizona?Â
How to do this?
Its actually not as hard as one may think. There are things you can do to your meta tags and title tags to include certain local areas through keyword phrases. You can also find some great sites to list with such as Yellowbook, or sites like www.uscity.net that focus on bringing you local traffic.
When you are creating information pages, create some that will focus on local search words. For example rather then optimizing for “mattress”, try optimizing for “Phoenix mattress” or “mattress in Phoenix” (if you live in Phoenix)  Use these words in the title tag, meta tag description, meta tag keywords and everything else…. This is a great way to add content to your site as well as giving the search engines some local pages to help get you better rankings, and better found.
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Great advice, Mat. There’s been a lot of hype the past year or two about local search and many businesses are quietly making a handsome profit from local search. The opportunity will only continue to grow as more consumers figure out how to search for local businesses online. Personally, I never touch a paper phonebook anymore. Why get my hands all dirty from the ink when I can google it or search yellow pages and get what I’m looking for in a fraction of the time?
There are tons of directories out there that let you list your site in a regional category. A regional listing in the biggies like Yahoo or Dmoz can do wonders for a local biz’s online exposure.
I think many people overlook the last example you gave about what I call “local SEO” by simply adding a location to your search keywords. You weed out a lot of competition who might not be focusing on your area and you are located. There’s a lot of value in that concept because it adds an extra level of targeting to your marketing efforts.