Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:50:42 by Kerry Dye
So you
are a small or medium size company who has a website, but your audience is
profoundly local. You might be an estate agent, a solicitor, a health club or a
dentist for instance. Are search engine optimisation techniques any use to you?
Of
course, we would say that they certainly are; but you as the local company have
to make the judgement call. In marketing the company, you have to take a lot of
factors into account, of which SEO strategies are only one.
Measurement
of traffic to your website is likely to be one of the
marketing metrics that you take into account however, and ultimately, you are
responsible for the conversion of any traffic that reaches that website. If you
have an effective conversion route then increasing your website visitors is the
next logical step. However, when you are local, the problem becomes more
complicated. You probably meet face to face with a lot of your customers, and
the visitors to your site won't be interested in what you sell if they have to
travel too far to see you. Locality is
key.
Therefore it is necessary to include this
regionalisation information into your site when it is optimised. Plus, SEO
effort needs to be focussed on attracting people from your local region. The
good news is that people who want local services usually make local searches.
They do look at community
directories, they do add local
qualifiers to searches: thus you will find "search engine optimisation
hampshire" and "seo company portsmouth"
in the analytics logs for us. The same is true for a good locally optimised
site.
And the good news is that the visitors
coming to your site will be well targeted, and good qualified visitors make the
job you have to do to close the sale or get the lead much easier.
Kerry Dye Campaign Delivery Manager |