Marketing Your Local Business

Local Marketing Online is perhaps the most effective and least understood of all the marketing methods available to a small business.  You may not be aware that some time ago, Google adopted an algorithm for search that defaults to local results.  

In other words, if you are searching for BEST ONLINE MARKETING FIRMS LOS ANGELES, you would naturally expect to target online marketing businesses located in the Los Angeles area.  But what if you simply typed BEST ONLINE MARKETING FIRMS? If you are typing on a L.A. based server, then local results would come up near the top.  

When local results are not available or do not serve enough traffic to warrant top placement in the results, then Google fans out to other areas.  Google attempts to match the relevancy of your search with the result; it assumes that you are interested in local results (whether or not you are), and first attempts to deliver those results, but also measures those results with the relevancy of your term, and gauges relevancy of the result based on a number of other factors.

Sound complicated?  It is.  Engineers at Google and other search engines spend entire careers working out search “algorithms” to ensure the most relevant results for their clients (You).  The good news is, you don’t really contemplate all that while searching.

Back to your local business.  What this means for you as a local business owner is that you need to be aware of Google’s programming to return relevant results.  Here are some major factors that improve your relevancy:

1. Work on making your pages relevant for your main keyword (your product or service), but also for your main keyword plus your location name.  
2. On each of your pages, try to focus on a common theme or keyword for that page.  Your page should be about something specific.  
3. Increase the number of backlinks to your website.  This will improve your relevancy score.  Do not make the mistake of linking to your homepage more than linking to other pages within your website.
4. Increase your buoyancy by linking internally within your site.

We have a passion for helping small business rank high in search engines.  It can be a lot of work for a small business to undertake on their own; please call upon us to manage the marketing of your local business, so you can focus on the more important task of managing your business.

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