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.

The Ready-to-Buy Psychology of Local Online Marketing

The internet is not just a global medium. It’s a powerful local medium. No matter where you live, people are searching for the service you provide with a local modifier: “[your city] [your service]” (like “Chicago dog walker” or “Kansas plumber”).

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.

Using Google Video For Your Local Business

Are you a local business looking to advance in the rankings? One way to do it is with video. If you create a video and post it on YouTube, you have a good chance of getting a nice high ranking… even on broad keywords!

Here is a great example of someone who did just that with the phrase “video SEO in Google”.

Why is video such a great opportunity? Search engines are designed to search written content — words — for clues to index things. In a page of 500 words, the search engine might make its indexing decision by looking for keywords that amount to only 2% to 4% of the total words on the page.

But a video can’t be searched in the same way. So search engines rely on far less information (through descriptions, tags, and perhaps outgoing links) to indicate what the video is about. The density of information is far greater. It’s like fishing with dynamite instead of a hook and worm.

What does for local businesses? You may not want to search for a broad term like “restaurant” or “plumber”. But you can still search pretty high with far more local terms — like “Miami plumber” or “Cincinnati restaurant” — using video.

Video gives good SEO benefits, but it also is a nice way to give a personal touch (which is one major reason why people buy from local vendors).

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