Local SEO: The Same Thing, Only Different What do Amazon and your local pizza parlor have in common? They both have websites. But while Amazon conducts almost all of its business through its website and ships worldwide, your local pizza parlor does a lot of its business in person and over the phone, and ships its product to a tightly-defined area. The two businesses are clearly trying to reach different audiences. How does that affect the pizza joint's SEO? For millions of local businesses â€" and the SEOs who serve them â€" that's not simply an academic question. Let's start with the basics. You'll still want to do appropriate keyword research, but you'll want to add a local element: “pizza atlantic city,†for example, if that's where your pizza place is located. And you'll still want to use keywords appropriately in all the right places on your web pages: title, summary, headers, etc. Serve up fresh, on-topic content regularly; content is still king wherever you live. Since you want to turn up in Google for local searches, you need to tell Google in no uncertain terms where you are located. Put your physical address and phone number in the footer of each web page. Submit your site to Google Local, and the corresponding services in Yahoo and Bing. Remember to use your city and county in your title tags, as Google pays a lot of attention to those. Keep the local theme going when you go after links. Google notices link exchanges between local businesses; in this case, it reflects well on you. You'll also want to get listed in local business directories. You might be able to get a link from the web site for your community's Chamber of Commerce, for example. There is some debate as to whether social networking sites help, and how much of a boost they can give you. Review sites such as Yelp might help, but they can also be a double-edged sword. Consider the company's customers; where do they “hang out†online, and where are they most likely to hear about the business? If the clientele frequents social networking sites, you may be onto something, but you still need to find out which ones. In the end, it depends on exactly what you're trying to accomplish. SEO may be one of many techniques used to improve sales; as such, you'll need to think of it as part of a larger picture. Do you get a better return on investment from AdWords ads or Valpak coupons? That's just one of many details you'll have to discover when you take marketing a local business to the next level. Good luck!
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