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How Your Small Business Can Use Local Search Engine Optimization

  

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 A lot of local businesses have a tendency to jump head first into the PPC pool to generate targeted traffic to their websites. What's bad about this? Well, buying search traffic isn't exactly cheap. Paid search is not something you want to become dependent on when you're a small business on a tight budget.

So how can you help bring visitors in your community to your site organically and for free? You can start by making sure your pages are properly optimized for search engines to reflect the areas your business serve:

1. Include Your Location in Page Titles and Headers

Make sure each of your pages includes the city you operate out of in the title. Usually [Business Name] | [Type of Business] + [Location] is a popular formatting convention for doing this.

So for example let's say you're a pizza shop in Brockton, Massachusetts and you want to give your "About Us" page an optimized title. Here's one way of optimizing your title tag:

About Joe's Pizza Shack | Pizza Restaurant in Brockton, MA.

 Additionally having your H1 header and content echo what you place in your page title can help. Let's say you go with the above title for the about us page. You can have your H1 header be:

About Joe's Pizza Shack in Brockton, MA

2. Submit Your Business to Online Directories

Listing your business on directories as Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local and Yelp! is free and easy. It's also another way for people to find your out about your business through search engines.  To quickly check where your business is listed on the web's most popular business directories you can visit getlisted.org.

In some cases you may find your business is already listed on one of these sites without you submitting the listing on your own.  If that's the case what you should do is take the proper steps with each site to claim your listing. Why should you claim your listing? So you can make sure the listing info is accurate, complete, and up to date. 

Every listing you fill out or claim should include a link to your website so searchers can find their way to your site easily. Certain directories give you the option to add photos, videos, and special coupons which will help generate more interest in your business to searchers. Some of these additional listing features are free on certain directories (Yelp!, Google Places) and others may charge you an additional fee to take advantage of them (Yahoo Local), so be sure to read up on the potential costs of each one.

3. Talk about local happenings in your blog.

Blogging about what's going on in your neighborhood on your company blog is a great way to not only show your visitors you care about your community, but another way of optimizing your pages. This dry cleaner in Birmingham, AL blogs about a music event happening in one of the neighborhoods he provides delivery service to. Not only does he include the town name in the blog title, but he also provides a link to a page he created specifically for this town on his own site.

Do you have a small local business (or know one) who practices good Local SEO? Tell us in the comments!