Depending upon your target keyword phrases, SEO Improvement might be as easy as improving your local SEO rankings. By local SEO I mean the optimization of your online marketing for phrases that you target geographically.
If your site is an eCommerce site that does not have a physical location, you probably won’t focus on location based SEO unless of course you are trying to add some variation into your campaign.
So if you want to show up for a certain location, you need to improve your sites performance on sites like Google+ Places for business in addition to the organic listings . Do this in several ways.
- Increase your citations. Citations are mentions of your business that include your official company name(not a keyword title), your address, and your phone number. Additionally, many citations also include links to your website. Some examples of citations could come from Yellowpages.com, superpages, Yelp, and many others.
GetListed.org for Local Citations
One cool website I think every business that wants to improve their SEO performance locally should use is GetListed.org which was just acquired by SEOmoz.org.
I like using this site when I am looking for Local SEO clients. When I am out cold
calling(I rarely cold call though) I will put potential clients business names and zip codes into the tool, to see how well their online presence is doing. After a short time, a percentage of “local optimization” is given, along with a list of sites that they are both lsited in and not in or in but need to be edited or claimed. Give it a try, its a pretty cool little site.
- Create and add content to your site(s) for both your keywords and the geographic area. My friend Tracy over at Suchaneatfreak.com, wants to rank for home staging+ several towns. She just did a home staging job in Collegeville Pa. So we did multiple things to get her to rank for this phrase. (At the time of this post she has several listings on page one for the keyword phrase)
- Did a post about her Collegeville Home staging project and made sure to add keyword rich tags to the post as well as some pictures.
- Added a Collegeville Home Staging project to Houzz.com(Houzz.com is a great social site for the home improvement niche that ranks really well and counts as a citation)
- Created a Facebook Gallery about the home staging project.
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Given more time, my friend could do a few more things to dominate the 1st page of Google for the phrase such as:
- Do at least 1 Youtube video about the project and use the keywords in the title and tags.
- Do a guest post on another home improvement/interior design related blog that links to the post. Perhaps she could talk about her methods for staging a home that sells within a week after listing on the market.
- Get some backlinks to the post.
Local SEO Sales Tip
Often times I will email this site to new business’s and let them know that they can get their businesses listed for free, but it does take a considerable bit of time(what many business’s don’t have). I then ask them if they would like we offer a local optimization service for new business’s that adds them to most of the sites listed in the Getlisted.org results.
In an upcoming post, I will review a new premium resource for finding citations, so be sure to sign up to get updates via email or feed.
Got any Local SEO Tips or Resources to Share?
About the author
Adam is the Social Media Director at Baldy Dog Search Strategies, and is also the lead on all local SEO at BaldyDog.