Serving a Local Market

If your business serves a local market, you actually have several opportunities to make your presence known to internet searchers, even if you don’t have a web site!

Planning and implementing your local internet strategy should be looked at as a series of steps. The number and degree to which you are able to implement these steps will be unique to you and your business.

Step 1 is easy and very cost effective; it consists of listing your business in the many local on-line directories, such as Google Maps, Yahoo Local Listings and several of the regional and national Internet Yellow Pages (IYP), such as Switchboard and Local.com. These are services that invite businesses to submit your information at no cost. However, you should note that they offer no guarantee that your information will be accepted, when it might be accepted or in what position your listing will appear once it is listed.

Step 2 is a way to get your website found by local internet searchers because a link to your site, also called an “ad” appears higher on the page of search results. Regionally targeted Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN adCenter. PPC campaigns are specifically designed to position your ad on search engine sites for specific keywords and you can have a marketing campaign that includes as many keywords as you like, unlike free listings that only allow you to select a few “categories”.

These regionally targeted campaigns allow you to specify a local serving area so that only searchers in your area see your ads. Then when they click on your ad, they are delivered to the appropriate page on your web site. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site.

Step 3 is similar to Step 2, but your ad has the ability to be seen nationally or even internationally. For example, if you own a flower shop in Dallas, TX and someone in Florida was searching the internet for a "florist in Dallas", they would see your ad in your national campaign, not the one in your local campaign. This assumes you have a different campaign in Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search. Knowing how to construct successful local and national campaigns that do not overlap or cause you to bid against yourself is not so obvious and is why you should consider a professional to create and manage your internet marketing campaign.

Step 4 is a bit more complicated, but can be accomplished when your web site is designed properly. The technique is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. A good web designer will have built your site with SEO in mind and would have had a very deliberate conversation with you about how it should be done. Using SEO techniques to promote a local business is difficult to accomplish if your goal is to maintain a high ranking (on the first page) for even a few keywords. For more information see our page on SEO versus PPC for local advertising or request your free copy of our FREE Special Report, The Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing where we go into even more detail.

In a perfect world, a business will have gone through a very methodical process before building a web site to insure that it delivers the desired result. If you are contemplating the initial development of your company’s web site or you are considering a remake of your existing site, take a moment to review the page on web site planning in our Resources section. It could mean a great deal of difference in how well your web site performs in achieving your company’s overall goals.