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.

Why Internet Marketing is Right for Local Offline Businesses — Part 1 of 4

The thinking goes like this: Internet marketing might be fine for global businesses but local offline businesses (whose customers are drawn through word of mouth or local advertising from the surrounding neighborhoods) aren’t looking online for a service provider.

However, they are looking online! Local internet marketing provides another powerful marketing channel for local businesses to pursue… and it’s even better than offline marketing.

The Kelsey Group is an advisory and consulting service specializing in marketing (particularly search and Yellow Pages marketing). In their annual search forecast, they write that local search is going to become a huge part of marketing for local businesses, outpacing broader global search.

“Local search growth will outpace [broader global] search growth through 2013. Local businesses and those that target geographic areas will make a sustained effort to build … their online presence.“

For the next three years (at least), more and more local businesses are going to get on board with local-focused internet marketing. Your competitors probably are… will you?