Local SEO: local store marketing – part 1
Studies indicate that “70% of U.S. Households Now Use the Internet When Shopping Locally for Products and Services.” (The Kelsey Group and ConStat Indicates) Ian White reported that “40% of [search] queries have local intent.”
If you own a business that depends on local traffic – restaurants, lodging, retail stores and/or services – you simply can’t ignore the above statistics. Furthermore, as the cell phone browsing experience improves, the number of searches with local intent could really swell. So what’s a local business owner to do? First, you need to have a website. Second, you need to start thinking about local store marketing.
Similar to ‘regular’ SEO, local SEO is not something that can be accomplished overnight. Many of the strategies you would consider for optimizing your site for general search though, also apply to local SEO (such as link building and the number of sites that link to yours). If you have a well-built site and are ready for online visitors, the first thing you should do is make sure your business is listed in all the major local business directories. Below is a list of eight directories you must update, in rough order of importance. (TIP: infoUSA actually provides much of the data for the remaining sites. That being said, go into each one and add your listings individually to ensure coverage and more control.)
Listing your website in these directories is a first step to improving your rankings in the local search engines. There’s a lot more to it than that though…stay tuned for more.
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