Local internet marketing should be the foundation of every small company’s marketing strategy. After all, local internet marketing is the process by which companies use the internet to increase the number of business opportunities available and try to turn those opportunities into real world profits. Realistically speaking, this means that local internet marketing is a way for you, as the business owner, to increase your profits and grow your business by using the internet to market your company. This is a relatively new field, but local internet marketing is expanding in a real way and the results that come from doing local SEO could mean saving your company from an untimely failure.
When first researching small business internet marketing, the process can be slightly hard to understand. The end goal is to drive internet traffic to your website from one of the many search engine mediums that Google (or any other search engine) provides. Some of the most common of these mediums are videos, blogs, images, news items and even paid ads which appear on the search engine results page (SERP). This is by no means a comprehensive list; there are many other mediums through which the search engines can list your website. Google, Bing and Yahoo all use algorithms to calculate who should be at the top of their search engines lists for each medium. While these algorithms vary slightly between the top search engines, there is a common thread that ties them all together. Getting to the top of the SERP depends largely on the number of links that there are on the internet which are directed to your website. However, before being ranked by a search engine, it is important to make sure that your website has been optimized to do so. Generally speaking, this means that you have all the right content, videos, text, links, audio and images put on and taken off your website. All of this is a major part of the local search engine marketing process.
After your website has been fully optimized, you can then begin to place links to your site throughout the internet and fully begin your local internet advertising. There are several different ways in which you can go about doing this. The main methods of doing local internet marketing include running ad campaigns and doing local search engine optimization. Ad campaigns can be run in two completely different manners; either you pay the hosting site for every time someone clicks on your ad, or you pay them for every time the ad is viewed. The advantage to using a pay-per-click, or PPC, campaign is that you only pay for the traffic that comes into your site, no matter how many times the ad is viewed. If your product is extremely well-known, however, paying a hosting site based on the number of views can work to your advantage. There are times when all you need is to put a thought into the head of the viewer which will compel them into buying the product. In either case, however, the same idea is being propagated; the idea behind advertising in this manner is that you are looking for people whom you must then convince to buy your product. The same is true for every banner ad, every YouTube video and every internet radio spot. You are seeking them, not the other way around.
The grand advantage to search engine optimization is that your customers are already looking for your product when they find you. There is no need to convince your customers that they need to buy your product; from the moment that they type your keyword into the search bar, they are looking for a company that is selling that particular product. The only thing that you need to do is to get your company to the top of the search results so that those customers will click on your website and come to you before all of your competitors. The best way to get your website to the top of that search engine results page is through local SEO.
While in many regards local internet marketing and general search engine optimization are the same thing, there are some key differences between the two. First and foremost, SEO is done for and by companies who are striving to gain a national audience. These are companies who are either completely internet based or who have enough businesses located throughout the country to warrant a nationwide campaign for customers. These customers have very basic keywords that do not restrict their services to any one particular part of the country. On the other hand, there is local SEO, which is primarily used by small businesses who are trying to gain customers from one particular city or region of the country. As a result, most of these business owners will have keywords which include the city in which they are located or cities which are located in the same area. Having a keyword with the location in it allows the search engines to connect your business with one particular area of the country and helps people in that area of the country find you more easily. This would not be necessary for a nationwide internet marketing campaign, but is essential in internet marketing for local business.
Nearly every business can benefit from having some SEO work done for them. Local internet marketing can especially give you an edge over your competition when you are searching for local clients. However, as a small business owner, it can be extremely overwhelming trying to create a local SEO campaign by yourself. The solution is to hire a local internet marketing company which will provide your business with the valuable links that your website needs to climb in rankings. An experienced local internet marketing association will be able to help you optimize your website and will provide insight as to which keywords will be the easiest for your company to rank for. With a good local internet marketing company in place, you can see your search engine rankings rise and an increase in business as a result.
