Tips for Local/Geo Marketing
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.
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twright -
Thanks
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Andy Crofford -
Thanks
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