subject: How Local Search Can Benefit Your Business [print this page] When it comes time to examine the internet marketing tools that a small business has available to them, SEO is almost always the first place a business will turn. The reason for this is twofold. The first is that out of all the internet marketing methods available, SEO is almost always the most cost effective. The second reason is that the majority of online traffic still comes from natural search, a resource that you can only effectively tap through SEO efforts. However, local search is one element of SEO that is far too often overlooked by the small business owner trying to get ahead online.
The reason why you should never overlook local search, is because even if it only brings you a few extra hits and a handful of sales each month, it is very easy to start improving your results in local search. In fact, for most people it would only be the work of a short day to take a few steps that could start showing an improvement on the local search front.
The first, and one of the most important things that you must do if you want your company to be performing better from a local search perspective is to add a complete, "contact" page on your website. By complete, it doesn't mean that you just need a way for your customers to actually reach you through that page, although that is useful for other reasons. Instead, it means that you need to have a complete street address, with zip code, and a phone number with an area code. To see even better results, include this information on every page of your site, such as in the footer.
The next thing that you need to do is to start getting your site listed in some directories of businesses targeted at your area. The best example of this is something like an online yellow pages, but there are other types of directories that you may want to aim at as well. Anything which is unique to your sector or to your geographic area is a good directly to be listed in, especially if you can include a full address, phone number, and a link to your website. If you do even these simple things, you will already start to see an improvement in your local search performance. Hopefully, that will encourage you to go deeper and put even more effort into this effective SEO strategy.
by: Scott P Gallagher
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