Local Marketing using SEO.

SEO and marketing to your local market.

I am writing a series of articles on how to get top rankings in the major search engines with organic search results.  This is for your local market.  City, geographical area.

There are two type of search results, organic or paid subscription.  I prefer the organic results.  They are free and you can still get number one rankings.  Get a domain name and hosting package.  You'll never have to pay anybody to get you top rankings.

Hint on your domain name. Choose a domain name that reflects your product or service.  Keep it as short and simple as possible. You may even use a keyword or search term for your domain name.  It should be easy to remember, easy to say and type.

You'll need to learn some basic website building if you don't already know how.  You can get a simple editor that will work fine.  I use an old version of Adobe Page Mill.  Very basic but does the job.

Marketing to your local community using SEO with a basic website can be very effective.

You can score very high rankings in the two big search engines for certain keywords.  Number one in many cases. 

In most cases all online businesses provide the rep with a duplicate website to use for promoting.  The same website or series of websites that everybody else in the business gets.

You have no control over the content of the site, which means you have limited marketing capabilities.

The easy fix is getting your own domain name and website.  This allows you 100% control in all of your online marketing.  An auto responder is also needed to help automate your business and view stats of your marketing efforts.  More on that later.

Decide which product or service you are going to promote and then you can start planning a basic website that promotes your things.

You need to do a little research about your products/service.  Do a search on google and yahoo for your type of product or service.  Don't type in the company name or anything, just keep it generic.  Most people wont know your product or service by name, so type in something that is a general search term for what you are offering.  Include the name of your city or area in your search.

Example, if you sell Xbrand super shampoo, type in shampoo your city.  Or key words that relate to your product or service. 

Look at the results and you'll see what others are promoting in your area that may be similar to your business.

Try various search terms including your city in the search and compare results.  Take notes of the different keyword searches you did on a piece of paper.  You'll want some of these keywords in the content of your website.  The name of your city or area should be included on your webpages in a couple of places as well.

Go to google and sign up for an ad words account.  Go to the tools section and mess around with the search terms and results.  It's free and you can get a ton of stats. Information like how many people are searching for the search terms you enter, the advertiser competition, peak times that people searched, and more.

If you see more people searching for something with less advertiser competition, then that search term would be a good key phrase to use in the content of your site.  You'll want to get as many good key phrases and search terms as you can.  The ones with less advertiser competition, the better.

Take some time researching and coming up with new search terms and markets to target.  Over a few days or more, you'll come up with a nice list of local search terms and key phases that you will want to include in your web page or pages.

If you are promoting more than one item or service,  you'll need a seperate web page for each one.  This will allow you to maximize your marketing for each product or service.

Ok, so now you have a pile of good key word search terms, so now you need content.

Your content should show the benefits of using your product or service.  It should be easy to understand and the user should be able to navigate easily to find information.

Your information should be broken into sub headings about a paragraph or so each.  If you bold the heading line, then the viewer can read and navigate around your content with ease.

Use one or two images only.  You want your site to load as quick as possible for those with slower internet connection.

Ok, so that's it for now.  That should leave you plenty to do for a while. 

Next article I will talk about all the little things that make your site get found by the web crawlers, spiders and bots and how to include them all into your basic website.  You don't need all the flashy bells and whistles on your site, search engine spiders don't care.  They care about relative content.

 Bye for now,

Mark Austin