Receiving local search engine traffic is one of those things that small businesses often seek, but do little to target correctly. Many in fact have no idea that you can target Scotland, or in fact, a single town within Scotland. If that is the case, what can a small business do to get traffic that is targeted to both Scotland and their product?

To answer this question you need to look at what factors affect the search engine’s results when a local search is required.

• Product or Service: obviously the product or service is important. Your SEO strategies need to optimise keywords based on your product or services
• Target Region: the second component that needs to be targeted is the town, city, region or country. The target area must be included and closely associated to all your keywords. In effect, the area you are targeting together with your product or service become the one keyword

Having established your keyword set, you need to optimise all of your pages with these links. However, there are other areas that need specific attention as well.

• Address: simply having your address in the footer of all pages can give your site a huge boost. Be sure to include everything that helps to pinpoint your address. Street name (and identifier eg, Rd or St.), the town name and any postal codes. Having your full telephone details can also help, particularly if you include international codes (make sure you prefix with the words telephone, fax, or phone).
• Internal links: use specific geographic terms in all internal links. Don’t forget to use local terms as well (slang). These links should be optimised for both geographical location and product/service.
• Link out: links from your site to other related sites can be quite beneficial. The relationship does not have to be strictly applied either as links such as ‘our visitors find xxx parking in xxx to be reliable’ or ‘when visiting xxxx, our visitors prefer to stay at xxx’. Be sure to include your targeted region name in the link.
• Incoming links: find local directories and get listed with their services. You can also encourage local businesses to link to you, perhaps in a similar way to the previous point.

If these areas are targeted for local search using both the geographical terms and product/service terms as complete keywords, you will find that your position in those local search results will climb significantly.

Local search takes a lot of thought and some careful planing but the results can be spectacular when it comes to increased traffic.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under Local Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.