SEO For Local Business – Picking Your Keywords

You’ve heard the hype of what the internet has to offer your business and you wanted to get involved. So, you followed a simple plan:

• Built a website

• Installed Google Analytics

• Wrote content to match keywords

• Exchanged some links

• Waited for traffic and leads

You kept waiting…

SEO-For-Local-Business

There are over 300,000,000 websites online. To get your website onto the first page of Google is going to take some work.

Luckily, Local SEO is not as hard as it looks. You can laser target your keywords. Laser targeting your keywords means that:

• Ranking in SERPS is going to be easier

• Traffic will convert at a higher rate

• You will be creating a powerful marketing tool

The question is can you do this without external help? There are plenty of companies offering SEO outsourcing, allowing you to utilise the skills of their search engine optimisation specialists. The truth is, if you have some spare time, you can do some or all of the work yourself.

Understand what SEO for local business really is…

We will go with the assumption that you run a plumbing firm, operating in Birmingham, UK. As you built your site, you were probably thinking that words such as: plumber, cheap plumbers and 24hr plumbers are the right keywords to target, wrong!

Local SEO involves creating long-tail keywords that includes your geographical location.

Targeting the shorter keywords (e.g plumber) is going to be much more difficult. Bear in mind that many of the visitors (if you manage to rank), will not actually be local to your business, so conversions will be low.

Here is how you decide on keywords for your business…

Deciding on keywords

First of all, you can use the AdWords Tool to check that the keyword you are targeting is actually being searched by potential consumers.

1. When you log into the AdWords Keyword Tool, just above the “Search”, ensure that the search is set to “United Kingdom”.

2. To the left hand side, you will see boxes that you can check, or uncheck. Ensure that it is set to “Exact”. This then shows the amount of people that are searching for the exact phrase, not a variation of it. For “Plumber”, you can see the global reach is 60,500 and the “local” (UK) reach is 5,400. The “local” number is the one you need to focus on.

local-seo-for-business-exact-match

3. We want to be slightly more targeted. Most plumbers work within a 30-50 mile radius, unless they are tendering for large jobs. With that assumption you will want to target 3 types of locations:

• Solihull – A part of South Birmingham, so what could be considered to be a “sub-keyword”

• Birmingham – The “main” area you operate in and your keyword

• West Midlands – The “parent” area, which Birmingham area is located in

4. Laser target the search you’ll see that the numbers for “plumber Solihull”, “plumber Birmingham” and “plumber West Midlands” change to 73, 210 and 16 (as of 01/04/2013).

5. From those searches, you can see that the main two you should focus on are the “sub-keyword” and the “main” keyword. It would be pointless to focus on the “parent” (West Midlands) as there would be a lot more competition and the monthly searches are incredibly low.

6. Obviously you can use lots of variations for keywords. You could mix different areas (e.g. Lapworth, Harbourne and Northfield) and different plumbing keywords (e.g. plumbers, heating engineer and drain specialist) together to make new phrases.

Judging competition

You need to judge your competition to determine how well you will rank. There are 3 quick and easy searches that will give you an idea:

1. Input the domain into OSE. This will give you an overview of the website in terms of the SEO profile.

2. Do a visual check. Are the companies that are listed big and well known companies, possibly national? If so, it might be harder to rank!

3. Check for the amount of results that are listed in Google. An example as been provided below.

• Search “Plumber Birmingham” in quotes (this brings in results that contain that keyword).

• For “Plumber” 63,000,000 results are listed; a lot of competition!

• For “plumber Birmingham” the results drop to 11,200. Now you have a keyword that you can easily compete for page 1 rankings on Google!

Now you have a good range of keywords to start with!

Jason

Jason

I'm an internet Marketer with a love for online business. Get in touch if you need a helping hand with Internet marketing, SEO or Business

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