March 20th, 2010 by Mike

It is easy to focus on the big markets for the search engine optimization of your website, but what if you want to focus on appealing to your own local area? If you have been focusing your marketing to appeal to the audiences online, you may want to also try to target the local audience for your website. There are different kinds of strategies that you may want to try when you are going to reach a local market and it can affect the way that you plan and implement your SEO strategy. When appealing to smaller groups of people or a certain geographical area, you need to make sure that your landing pages are being optimised as they should.

Landing Pages

Creating landing pages with the right keywords that will allow you to reach a local audience is key. If you want your site to draw in traffic from a certain area, you need to be sure that you direct your keywords for those pages in the right way.  For example if you provide gardening services in the North West of England, you may want to create landing pages for several cities or towns near your location. The keywords you may target on your main homepage could be something like ‘hedge trimming’, ‘lawnmowing services’, and ‘gardening services’, so for your local landing pages you may want to use something along the lines of ‘hedge trimming in Cheshire’, and ‘gardening services near Cheshire’ etc for each page. Targeting the local audiences in your area instead of globally can help you improve the rankings that you can get with the search engines because there will not be as many other websites to compete with using your local search terms/keywords.

Local Search Strategies

The SEO strategies that you use to reach markets when you are doing global ads is different than how you should approach local advertising. You may want to consider doing both pay-per-click advertising and SEO when you are appealing to your local area because, depending on the amount of competition you have with other websites offering the same products in your area, you may be able to bid lower on the PPC ads and still get theconversions  that you are looking for, especially as search engine optimisation always takes a while to come into full effect. Before you create the landing pages that you are going to use for your local SEO efforts, you can use your PPC analytics to find out what keywords are doing the best and which ones are likely going to help you target the local area. You should still approach the local SEO with the same consideration that you do for international SEO campaigns and be sure to choose the best list of SEO keywords that you can to include in both your meta tags and your content.