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.

Local search engine marketing myth #1: Locals don’t search online. Wow, this is a big one. Locals do search online for things that they will later go and buy at the store. Therefore, you need to make sure that you are meeting their online search needs. This trend is going to rise alongside the mobile web because people will search on the go.

Local search engine marketing myth #2: Your competitors can work to achieve the same keywords, too, so what’s the point. This makes some sense. If you want to aggressively target some other kind of brand in the hopes that people will search for that instead, it’s perfectly understandable. However, there is a lot of opportunity in local search right now because consumers are searching locally more often but local businesses haven’t caught up to the demand yet.

Local search engine marketing myth #3: It can be done by the business owner. This is a pervasive myth because small businesses may not have the budget to create big local SEM campaigns. However, SEM isn’t done well simply by buying a book or asking your web-savvy cousin. SEM is best done by a marketing professional with proven experience in it.

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.

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

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.

As a business serving local customers, that is great news for you over Christmas! If you’ve been marketing your business effectively to the local online marketplace throughout the year, you’ll benefit over Christmas when your customers need to find the perfect gift in your city.

So, think about what customers are buy over Christmas and start marketing that right now. It’s not too late! Don’t forget to put in your city modifier. And if you don’t get the Christmas rush this year, there’s always next year:

Step one: Identify the top selling products that your face-to-face customers (not your online customers) buy from you.

Step two: Implement search engine optimization techniques around those products and be sure to include your local modifier. So, if you are in Gettysburg and you sell pet supplies, you might normally target the words “Gettysburg pet supplies” but (in preparation for Christmas) you should also target the words “Gettysburg dog biscuits”, “Gettysburg dog houses”, “Gettysburg fish bowls”, etc.

There is a huge opportunity for you here to not only dominate your local market for your [city keyword] plus [industry or service keyword] but also [city keyword] plus [specific product keyword].

A fictional biography is a synthesized description of a typical or ideal target audience who sees and responds to your marketing. For example, a company targeting a term like “Orlando car repair” might describe their typical or ideal target audience like this:

“Our ideal audience is a vehicle owner located in Orlando proper or within fifty miles of the city. They own a popular domestic or import vehicle that is no more than 10 years old and consider it to be a valuable asset and their second biggest investment (next to their home). Although they may or may not have a lot of discretionary income, they see their vehicle as a critical part of their lives and are willing to spend money to maintain it. They seek our services for repairs and for regular preventive maintenance. Most importantly, they live in or near Orlando and search for ‘Orland car repair’ when they need our services.”

A fictional bio, then, helps you to identify important elements in your marketing so you can adjust it and target it more effectively. In the example above, the marketer might note that the age of the car could become a modifier in a search. So they might research to see how often someone searches for “Orlando car repair” versus “Orland new car repair”, for example.

First, you need to apply “pull” techniques inside your website to attract local searchers to your site. These “pull” techniques might include:

• Keyword optimization
• Alt tags
• Compelling local content

Second, you need to apply “push” techniques outside of your website – at other marketing locations, for example – to drive people to your site. These “push” techniques might include:

• Article distribution
• Press releases
• Google AdWords
• Videos posted on YouTube
• Appearance on Google Maps

When it comes to online marketing, there isn’t one strategy that is more important than another. They are both equally critical to ensure that you will search when someone types in your service plus your local target market.

When creating a search engine marketing plan, be sure to include both onsite “pull” techniques and offsite “push” techniques to appear in the search engine listings you’d like to target.

And as you do this, be sure that it doesn’t replace the offline marketing you are currently doing. If you use print or display marketing, billboards, or networking, those things should continue. Rather, your online push and pull local internet marketing should enhance – not replace – your current marketing practices.

Marketing with this “[your city] [your service]” technique has some advantages: It’s faster to achiever higher search engine ranking placement and it costs less because you’re not competing against larger multinational conglomerations with huge search engine optimization budgets.

But there’s something else that is important to consider about the psychology of searchers who are searching locally. Let’s say you are thinking of buying a car. You type in “car” into a search engine and see what comes up. Maybe you narrow it down by manufacturer.

So, let’s say that as you do your research you go from searching for “car” to searching for “midsize car” to searching amongst “general motors”, “ford”, “dodge”.

This is all at the conceptual level; the research level. What happens when you’re ready to buy? You don’t just type in “Ford dealership”.

No. If you live in Atlanta, you type in “Atlanta Ford dealership”… Notice that’s the [your city] [service] search.

So, the psychology of people search locally is this: They are ready to buy.

The web is a powerful research tool, but the terms used to research are general and broad. Searchers hit credible, authoritative sites to get more information. And when they’re ready to buy? They add a local modifier and look to a solution provider in their neighborhood.

• Chicago Pizza
• Cincinnati Wine store
• St. Louis Dairy
• Bethesda Chiropractor
• Bethesda Maryland Lawyer
• etc…

One of the ways to do this is to create  search engine optimized anchor text. Here’s the difference between the most frequent form of links and the superior SEO anchor text:

Let’s say you’re me. And let’s say that I’m marketing on other sites (i.e., forums, blogs, or article distribution sites). When I have the chance to include a link back to my site, I could simply link like this:

Visit LocalSEMExperts.com

When search engines see this, they think: “oh, that LocalSEMExperts.com word points to http://localsemexperts.com”… and so my site gets a “vote” which contributes to my search engine ranking. That’s what most businesses do when linking back to their site.

BUT if I instead linked my website address to the phrase:

Visit the Maryland Internet Marketing Agency

… then I get the “vote” for the link back to my site PLUS the search engines associate my website with “Maryland Internet Marketing Agency” and I can begin to appear for that phrase, too. So next time someone types “maryland internet marketing” or “maryland marketing agency” into the search engines, I’m more likely to appear.

These custom anchor texts give your local business a very powerful way to target your business to your local clients. So, identify a few keyword phrases you want to be searchable for (usually your locale and a main keyword) and create anchor links with those as I’ve shown above.

If you don’t want to do this work yourself, please see our Local Domination Service Packages