Posts Tagged ‘geotargeting’

Should You Write About Local Events On Your Blog?

Monday, July 18th, 2011

One of the ways to ensure that your website ranks well for local geo-phrases is to write about local events and places, but you have to be careful how you do it. If your blog is for a local brick and mortar business that is trying to attract customers from within a specific geographic area, then one way to “humanize” that blog is to write about the people and places in your area – in a good way, of course.

First and foremost, you want to build good will with the people in your community. One way to do that is with customer spotlights, or feature stories.

Look at your local newspaper to see how this is done. Most community newspapers devote a part of their story space each issue for local features. These usually include a photo with a write up of a local person. It can be a celebrity, a person in the community who is active in real social work or community improvement, or it can be someone who is doing, or has done, something extraordinary.

Here are five different types of stories about people in your community that you could write for your blog no matter what product or service you offer:

  • Someone who has used your produce or service in an unusual way or who has done something extraordinary with your product or service.
  • As a community service, you could highlight people in your community that you think are performing a valuable service to the community. It could be a business person, a politician, or a community organizer.
  • If you have a prospective customer profile, choose someone who fits your target group but who is not a customer and ask them to try your product for free, then solicit their feedback and report it with brutal honesty.
  • You can also write up a personality profile of your 100th customer for the day, or think up another fun event where one person can be a winner and just write up a 300-500 word personality profile on the person telling who they are, what they do for a living, what their hobbies are, etc. Expect nothing in return for this. It’s a fun community service idea.
  • Hold a contest. Write about the winner on your blog.

There are more ways to use local people and organizations to geotarget your blog. These are just a few fun ways.

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Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »

New Search Engine For Vets

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

If you are a veterinarian or pet doctor, then you now have a new way to market your practice. It’s a search engine for veterinarians powered by Google.

The concept is nothing new. There have been search engines launched for specific professions for years. And the benefits are always the same.

By listing your veterinary practice in a profession-specific search engine like MyVeterinarian.com, you increase your chances of getting found by local people in need of your services. This happens in a couple of ways.

First, if someone finds the MyVeterinarian.com website and performs a search for vets in your area, they are likely to find you. Here’s the catch: That’s IF they find the MyVeterinarian.com website, which doesn’t have particularly high rankings at Google for the search term “veterinarian.” But that could change.

Secondly, with your listing in the search engine, if your website is linked to in the listing, then you’ll receiving better link popularity as a result, which can increase your own website in Google’s listings for the search term “veterinarian” and your local geographic search terms.

I always recommend listing a business in a professional directory or search engine. Unless there are serious issues with the site, it’s usually a positive. In this case, I’d say it’s definitely a positive.

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Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »

Geo-Targeting, Online Marketing in Your Own Backyard

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Most people think of the World Wide Web as well, world wide, but there’s a lot of local and regional marketing that small businesses can accomplish online. In fact, online searches have all but done away with the phone book. You want a phone number of your doctor, you go online. You want to buy new tires, so you type in tires, name of your city, and hit enter.

Small business websites are now creating geo-targeted web pages in order to reach their local customers–as well as those on the other side of the globe. The fancy term for this is geo-location, which simply put means that search engines are using various ways to figure out where you (technically, it’s you and your computer) are.

Geo-targeting search engines find local businesses by a variety of ways. They use your search terms–what you actually type in, your computer’s IP (Internet Protocol) address, which is unique to every computer, and partner search sites that are strategically placed.

All the major search engines offer local search features, and now, many of them such as Google Maps can lead customers straight to your brick-and-mortar doors. Even other websites are willing to help out local businesses. ShopLocal.com offers readers local and regional flyers from nearby stores. Just type in your city or zip code and you can find every sale that’s going on that week in your area.

Ways You Can Attract Geo-Targeting to Locate Your Website:

• Include your full address in your TITLE and DESCRIPTION Meta tags.

• Include your address information near the top of all of your web pages (each one as a header is one way to go) makes it easy for search engines to pick this information up.

• Include your business locations including city and zip throughout the content of your site.

• Register for local searches on major search engine sites.

• Include your city and other key information in links, and if you use PPC, pay per click, sign up for their local search feature.

Make it easy for your customers to find you. Geo-targeting is like drawing a bulls-eye around your business, and it’s that inner red ring that circles your small business online marketing strategy.

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Posted in Local Internet Marketing, SEO for Small Business, Small Business Internet Marketing, Tools for Small Business, Uncategorized, search engines, website development | 1 Comment »

How Is Local Optimization Different Than Traditional SEO?

Sunday, June 29th, 2008

Local businesses have special needs, or do they? Well, whether your business is local or global you’ll still need to perform search engine optimization on your website, blog, and other online marketing collateral. But how you go about it will be different.

An online florist only needs to optimize her website for words like “florist,” “flowers”, and related terms. But a local florist in Flint, Michigan will have to optimize her website to receive local traffic also. How do you do that?

There are several ways to perform local optimization on your website. The most obvious way is to include your brick and mortar address on your website. But are there other things you can do as well?

First, let’s clarify what we mean by including your address on your website. Just adding it to your Contact page isn’t enough. It needs to be on every page of your website. If you create a footer and include your footer on every page of your website then that will take care of that. Your footer should include physical address including zip code, phone number, a link to your contact form, mailing address (if different than your physical address), and links to other web properties like your blog.

Other than your footer, however, there are other ways to optimize your local business website:

  • Include your local geotargeting terms in your keywords meta tag
  • In your description, include your primary geotargeted keyword
  • Add your zip code to your keywords meta tag
  • Mention all the local communities you serve by name on at least one page of your website
  • Set up a separate landing page for each community or zip code that you do business in
  • When link building, use local geotargeted phrases for anchor text
  • Include your city name in the URL of your web address (for instance, BooksinFlint.com)

These are some very simply ways to go about optimizing your website for local search terms. And since you are dealing with a smaller geographic area it shouldn’t that difficult to rank for your important keywords.

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Posted in Local Internet Marketing, SEO for Small Business | No Comments »