Basic local KW question

[Danielm]

I'm sure I'm probably over complicating things but I have a quick question on local keywords.

If I wanted to target a local area and service, for example, "email marketing springfield" would I need to use that entire phrase in my pages and as my backlinks? I wouldn't just try to target "email marketing" and local people will find me first or is that only with google places because that would already show the local ones first?

Thanks!

[SimpleSEOTips]

Hi Danielm,

If I understand your question accurately then my advise would be to optimise for the local search term "email marketing springfield"
You will find that to get ranked for this search term rather than the generic phrase ""email marketing" will be a lot easier. However, you could take the option of building a specific landing page targeted to the local search phrase and use other pages on your site to target more generic ones.
And make sure you create a Google places account if you have a bricks and mortar business to help you achieve good rankings for local search results too.
Other tips would be to include your business address within the footer of your pages to give Google some more keywords relevant to an area to use.
There's lots more ways of targeting to local search terms including Google Webmaster tools settings but I'm sure you will get more tips and tricks from others within this post or other more specific ones you add to the forum.

Hope that helps.

[ChristineCobb]

Yes, target the phrase with the local name and do both keyword+local as well as local+keyword. Many times when your search phrase is an obvious local business like "florist", Google will serve up local businesses by default. But some search phrases like "email marketing" won't do that.

[MikeFriedman]

I saw a stat somewhere once that said something like 60% of the search inquiries in Google contain either a zip code or a city name. Not sure if that stat was accurate, but I would bet it is pretty close.

For a local business, it's a good idea to optimize for the local term, but also the global term.

For example...

I took on one client that when people searched for "blue widgets york, pa" they were number one. However, if someone just typed in "blue widgets" all of their local competitors in York, PA came up on the first page of Google, but they did not because they had only been optimizing for the local term while their competitors were only optimizing for the global term.

[Danielm]

Thanks all, very helpful!