One month in – How is your local SEO?

We’re basically one month into the year (well, give or take a few days). At the beginning of the year you probably made New Year Resolutions and now here we are, a month later… have you been following them?

The truth is, I don’t care that much if you haven’t been following your “watch what you eat” resolution or your “quit smoking” resolution, but what about your business marketing? If you own a small business and you’ve been trying to market it with local search engine optimization, how have you been doing?

I hope you’ve been busy with it, but there’s a good chance that it has lagged a bit. Sure, you had great dreams of a robust local SEM marketing plan as you approached 2010 but now that you’re here and your nose is to the proverbial grindstone, it might not be so easy.

So what can you do? Here are a few tips I’d suggest:

1. Try focusing on just one keyword at a time. Perhaps you’ve bitten off more than you can chew at once. There are a lot of facets to marketing and getting them all perfect the first time around is rare.

2. Get into a habit. That’s it. Find some local SEO thing that you like to do and get into a habit of doing it. Over and over. Once it’s a habit, add something else. But start with one small thing and make it a must-do thing every day.

3. Consider outsourcing. There are lots of marketing people out there who specialize in different facets of marketing and many business owners often outsource to them. Ironically local SEO is not something that is outsourced as often for some bizarre reason.

Squidoo as a local search engine marketing tool

Small businesses that want to search well for local keywords will do well to consider a local SEM strategy that includes Squidoo.

Squidoo.com is a site that provides a platform for user-generated content. It was created by the hugely popular marketing guru Seth Godin and it is one of the top 500 most visited sites in the world.

Here’s how it works: Users sign up for free and then create a “lens”, which is basically a website that users can then add different kinds of content to. A lens is something in between a website (which might be thought of as static and impersonal) and a blog (which might be thought of as dynamic and personal).

The site has a higher PageRank and its URLs are customizable. So, if you are a Cincinnati-based dry cleaner, you can (and should) get some Squidoo lenses with domain names like /CincinnatiDryClear and /CincinnatiDryCleaning and /DryCleaingCincinnati and so on. Of course, good local SEO success is not just in the domain name and backlink. You should be putting keywords throughout your site – in titles and in the content – so that it points back to you with the right tags. Don’t forget to add high quality, compelling content as well as images and videos to make your lens visually appealing.

You can create as many Squidoo lenses as you’d like so the sky is the limit in terms of what you can do. They are fun, too, with basic drag-and-drop functionality and really easy, intuitive interfaces. All of that helps to take some of the “work” out of marketing.

What’s up for 2010? Local Search Engine Marketing trends for this year.

Eminent local SEM blogger Andrew Shotland of LocalSEOGuide.com created a set of predictions for 2010. I consider them to be “must-reads” for all local SEO and SEM people out there, as well as businesses who are thinking about marketing locally online.

You can read the article here but I will summarize it for you:

Open Source Yellow Pages. In his article, he talks about how Twitter has the potential to become the clearinghouse for local Yellow Pages information, replacing current options.

Google will continue to grow. Google is going local and Andrew believes that they will increase their emphasis on local businesses this year.

Demand Media Strategy. This is where content no longer becomes arbitrarily created but strategically created and written. A colleague of mine who is a business writer does exactly this kind of work — content strategy — and is noticing a trend toward it as well.

Local guides. Shotland derides this method but I think it has legs for a while and will be the advantage for first movers.

Small Business SEO budgets will increase. This is good to hear. Businesses need to market themselves and invest in doing that successfully.

Want to read more about local search engine marketing trends? You can read all eleven plus additional insights here.

Want to read more about online marketing trends and how local fits in?
SEO Trends to Watch for In 2010
Predictions for the Changing Local Search Landscape in 2010

Planning your 2010 Search Engine Marketing

The New Year is almost upon us and that means new opportunities to market. If you’re in business and serving a local clientele, you’ll want to be targeting local keyword searches (which are made up of a keyword plus a local modifier, like “Denver pants store”).

So, what should your local search engine marketing plan look like?

Local search engine marketing plan – step one
Start by outlining the vision you have for your marketing. Do you want to attain top search engine results? Do you want to increase more foot traffic to your store or call-ins to your telephone number? Outline the metrics that you will use to determine success.

Local search engine marketing plan – step two
Next, outline your target market. Obviously they will include people in your local area but you probably also narrow them by other demographic features, such as income bracket, gender, etc.

Local search engine marketing plan – step three
Based on what you know so far, figure out what terms you want to target. Your products and services and industry are often key terms to use – “plumber”, “contractor”, “Laundromat”, etc. – and these will be combined with your local modifiers. In some cities, that’s easy, it’s just a single word. But in other places, that might not be as easy. New York City is abbreviated as NYC, so people might search with the abbreviation instead. Or perhaps there is a smaller neighborhood name that you want to target instead of your city name. You need to figure that out.

Local search engine marketing plan – step four
Fourth, outline the onsite tasks you need to do. These include revising the keywords on your site to more accurately reflect the local terms you’ve identified.

Local search engine marketing plan – step five
Lastly, outline the offsite tasks you need to do. For example, you might create press releases or distribute online articles or employ Google AdWords to generate traffic.

SEO technique: Squidoo

One of the challenges that business owners face when they are looking to build a local online presence is where to market their business. Many sites might not present the opportunities they need because those sites are global in their reach.

Squidoo is a site that offers a great opportunity for local marketers. Squidoo is a place where you can create a website – called a “lens” – easily with drag-and-drop modules offering a variety of content. It’s one of the top 300 most visited sites in the United States and it has a PageRank of 8 (out of 10), which is very impressive. It’s free to sign up and you can make as many lenses as you want.

Although you probably wouldn’t create a lens INSTEAD of a website, you just might create a lens, or two, or ten, or fifty that are related to your local keyword and point to your website.

For example, if you are a Laundromat in Houston Texas, and you’re facing fierce competition against other Laundromats for the term “Laundromat”, you can target the word “Houston Laundromat” (or narrow it down to your neighborhood level) and create a bunch of Squidoo lenses for keyword combinations like:

Houston Laundromat
Laundromat Houston
Dry cleaner and Laundromat in Houston
Trusted Houston Laundromat
(etc., etc.)

So, be sure to include a number of Squidoo lenses in your local internet marketing plan to help you lock in your top ten Google keywords.

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