Tips for Local/Geo Marketing

[Andy Crofford]

Though I have been a member of this forum for a year or so I just recently started posting. I have learned a great deal reading the posts here and wanted to give a little back. Hopefully this information isn't too basic and at least one person finds it useful.

What is Geo-Targeting?

Geo-Targeting is the process of using key phrases to target customers for local businesses. What you do is take a basic keyword and add a geo modifier. Example: Kansas City Ford Dealer or Dry Cleaner Overland Park.

Keywords/Phrases

You will find a lot of local small businesses will struggle to come up with keywords outside of the obvious ones. To be honest coming up with a lot of keywords is not that difficult, you just have to be creative.

Lets take a dry cleaners for example and look at the different services that they provide and add the geo modifier to it. So you could have:

Kansas City Dry Cleaner
<Zip Code> Dry Cleaner
<County> Dry Cleaner
<Neigborhood> Dry Cleaner

You can then reverse these and put the keyword first and the modifier on the end. Do this with all the various services they offer and you will get a ton of keywords. (example: Kansas City Wedding Dress Cleaning). Check out the Adwords Wrapper link in my signature. It will combine and wrap your keywords for Adwords from a single site with one click.

Search Engine Local Listings

Another thing you want to make sure you do is get the businesses listed in the search engines local listings:

Google Local Business Center
Yahoo Local Listing
Localeze (MSN)

I can't post links but they are easy enough to find using Google. Google requires verification by either phone or postcard, Yahoo does not and I am not sure about Localeze.

Geo-Targeted Content

Coming up with content for local business sites is probably one of the most difficult things to do when putting together a website. Here are some ideas for content, remember to optimize the content with your geo modifiers as much as you can:

-Testimonials
-Client Stories
-Blog & Work Logs (List how tos and benefits.)
-Featured Clients
-Pictures with captions
-Local Resources & information pages (ie A moving company could have a resource page beneficial to someone relocating to the area listing utilites and what not.)

Remember to try to avoid cookie cutter verbage/sites. Search and Replace is not your friend here. Though it may be quicker it is also likely to turn prospective customers off. Try to use unique content for each page no matter how tempting re-using wording is.

I want to stress again the importance of optimizing your titles, descriptions, captions, and content with your keywords + geo modifiers.

Sorry for being long winded here but I really wanted to contribute to this great forum. I hope someone finds it useful.

[twright]

Any information that is actionable information is good.

unfortunately so much content is distributed on WF.. this could have been said 2 days ago and you would have to read through 7 pages to find it..

Add it to your blog as well, of course with a little more info =)

[Andy Crofford]

Thanks for the great idea about the blog post. No idea why I didn't think of that.

Thanks,
Andy