I’ve been receiving many questions on how the trend to local search will affect a small business’ website, so I’m going to put my two cents in.
In case you haven’t been keeping up with what the major search engines are doing, here’s a quick overview. The future of search is in local search. Google, Yahoo!, Bing and the others try to keep track of what you search for, where you are geographically when you do the search and from that, they try to deliver relevant results that are closer to where you are located. Doing this will hopefully help you find what you need from a source close by.
So the question for small business is how can you take advantage of this. The obvious answer is to make sure your site is optimized properly. This is true, but most small business owners don’t know how to optimize their website and they can’t afford to hire someone to do it for them.
Simple SEO
Here is what I suggest you do. I’m sure many people will disagree with me, but this has helped others get higher local search rankings.
The first thing you need to do is decide what is the most important product or service to your business. Then go to the free tools Wordtracker or Google’s Keyword Tools, and research the best keywords/phrases to use for your product/service.
Now create one web page that centers on that product/service and use the keywords/phrases you discovered throughout the page. You don’t want to just keep repeating them but use them as often as you can. Be very liberal in your use of the keywords/phrases.
Next, add geo meta tags to the head of the web page. Here is a great free website, mygeoposition.com, that explains geo tags and will actually create the tags for your location.
Make sure you include the keyword/phrase in the name and title of the web page. This is a very important step.
Remember, you won’t get to page one overnight, but this will help get you on the way. Of course true SEO is much more complicated than what I have just discussed, but if you don’t know much about it and can’t afford to hire a professional, this is much better than doing nothing.
Here is a short free eBook on how search engines work.
Tags: Search Engine Optimization, SEO