Local Business
Marketing
A misconception many people have about local business marketing is that they have
to go up against the "big names." The truth is that you only have to perform better than other businesses in your
locality. There are many ways of achieving this depending on your location and market. There are methods that all
business sites need to adopt, but there are also many tasks that need to be customized for the individual business.
Let us take a look at some of these tasks:
Majority of businesses are aware of the importance of high Google rankings, but
most business owners, however, have no idea of how this can be achieved. A site ranked number one in Google for its
main keyword will receive majority of the traffic for that keyword. To achieve a good Google ranking, the first
step is creating a Google-friendly business site. Google considers several factors for grading your site. The more
"likable" the site, the easier it will be for the site to rank high. Creating a likeable site involves on-site
search engine optimization (SEO) as well as offsite SEO. On-site SEO involves things such as site content,
keywords, article headers, meta-tags, and links. Off-site SEO basically involves getting linked from other
sites.
Secondly, information about your local website should be available in all major
online directories. In addition to spreading the word about your business, this will help in gaining the trust of
customers, as they see your business listed in several places, and trusted back links to the site which is good for
authority and Google likes it.
Off-site SEO is also a very important online local business marketing method. It
is generally believed that the best offsite marketing strategy is to get linked by powerful, authoritative sites
that are relevant to your market. However, majority of authoritative sites do not allow back links of this nature,
and even if they do, they do it for a lot of money; therefore, other off-site SEO methods are usually
employed.
A term that has now become very common is "Web 2.0." The local business site
should be according to Web 2.0 standards. This means that the site should be interactive and not static. Remember
when comments and polls were a rarity? Well now they are in abundance. Search engines give importance to the fact
that a site is allowing people to participate. A site that is new and static will not achieve a good ranking. Some
websites also allow web links in the comment section. Leaving a comment with your website link is a good off-site
SEO strategy.
These are only some of the Online Local Business Marketing methods. There are many
other internet marketing methods one can employ to bring traffic to a site and gain customers. Some of these
methods may include list building, social media marketing, article marketing, and video marketing. All these
techniques help in strengthening the presence of an online business; however, they all of these techniques may not
be suitable for a particular site or market.
To your Huge Success
I hope you have An Awesome Day Too :)
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