Local Small Business Internet Marketing
Local internet marketing is an important strategy for small business.
For example, Kelowna is a small city with a trading area of just under 200,000 people in central southern British Columbia, Canada.
Due to the demographics of the population, and a large influx of visitors in the summer months, as well as winter skiers, Kelowna is a well-served community with plenty of amenities, lots of retail including a surprising number of internet marketing and web design companies.
Using internet marketing to target a local market this size or even larger, is a wise use of resources for most businesses. And, due to the largely reduced competition in comparison to a national or international internet marketing campaign, local internet marketing can be a vastly cheaper and more effective.
The first step for any business that wants to market locally on the internet, is to make sure they have a landing page targeted to the local market. Ideally the url of the website includes the keywords. Generally speaking, this means identifying the best keywords from prior SEO and PPC efforts, and adding a local designation such as the name of the community, the name of the region, or the name of the neighborhood the business is located in. Very simply, you are adding a geographic modifier to the keywords that you would otherwise use in your pay per click or search engine optimization.
For example, if I was a car dealer in Kelowna and my best keywords were “new cars” or “new pickups” I would simply add my location to those keywords and have new keywords on the new pages optimized for “Kelowna new cars” or “new cars Kelowna.”
Another very effective technique for local Internet marketing is to do brief videos, ideally under four minutes, with the title being your basic keywords with location. This video can be as simple as a screenshot of your locally optimized webpage with a voice-over describing the product or services offered. Upload the video to YouTube and other video sharing sites using the appropriate keywords in the description, in this case “Kelowna new cars.”
Very often in the local market the video will show up on the first page of the Google organic results. As a result, you not only gain a video presence on the first page of Google, you are actually in many cases bumping a competitor off the first page. If your local webpage shows up along with the video on the first page for the same keywords- a common occurrence in local internet marketing- you can easily take two or more of the 10 slots on the first page of the search results.
Finally, adding a PPC or pay per click search advertising campaign can be very effective for local marketing. Simply start an AdWords campaign using those locally modified keywords pointing to that locally optimized landing page. Your quality score will be very high, your costs very low, and you almost certainly will be on the first page for pennies per click. It is common to have two or more of the ten organic results as well as one of the top PPC results on the first page using this method!
The larger the market, and the more competitive the business climate in a given niche, the more difficult it is to achieve these results. Yet even in local markets much larger than Kelowna, it is still very, very easy in comparison to targeting a top keyword in a national or international campaign without that local modifier.
Wherever a business is located, assuming there are possible clients for its products or services in the area, it makes sense to do a local search campaign to pick up some cheap local traffic. Simply build a local landing page, optimize for locally modified keywords, and generate local search results with PPC, SEO, video uploads, and Google business listings.
Daren Wride KelownaInternetMarketing.com Kelowna Internet Marketing
Learn about our local marketing tactics at Kelowna Internet Marketing Tactics
Author: Daren Wride
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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