Local Marketing Guide

When doing online marketing for your local business, you should think about whether potential customers are searching for your type of business on both the general search engines and the local search engines. There’s no way that I know of to measure the volume of searches for the local search engines, but as mentioned in the previous chapter, you can get an idea for how many people are searching for a particular keyword phrase on the general search engines by using Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool. Try to think of general keywords that describe what your business offers because people are going to be searching on a broad array of terms. If you are a local business, try mixing in some different combinations of your geographic location. For example, if I were in the auto repair business and was located in Queens, a borough within New York City, I might try typing in “auto repair queens” or “auto repair new york city” or “auto repair nyc”. The Keyword Selector Tool will then spit back a list of related keyword phrases along with the count, which is the number of times it got queried in the previous month. If the tool gives you a count (that is, a number other than zero), it means that it might be worth your while to get your site listed for those keyword phrases. If the tool is not returning a count, it means that people aren’t searching for that keyword phrase, so you shouldn’t put a lot of effort into getting listed for that keyword phrase unless you have reason to believe that people will be searching it in the future.

If you’ve deemed that people indeed are searching for businesses like yours in your locale using general search engines and you want to grab some of that traffic, there are 2 paths you can take and they’re not mutually exclusive. You can do paid search or search engine optimization.

Paid Search
You might have heard of people advertising their business by using Google or Yahoo. Also referred to as pay-per-click advertising, paid search allows you to run a text ad against a certain keyword phrase. You choose the keyword phrases you want to target (i.e. auto repair new york city), decide on what you want your advertisement to say, and then, when people search for that keyword phrase, your ad will come up. The great thing about paid search is that you only have to open your wallet when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website. So it’s a way of ensuring that you’re paying money only for people who are interested in what you’re selling. Below is an example of what the paid search ads in Google look like.

Search Engine Optimization
Unlike paid search, “natural search listings” or “organic listings” are the list of sites that a search engine returns based on how relevant it thinks your site is to the keywords being queried. If you look at the above image, you can see how the placement of listings differs from paid search.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process where through a number of means, one tries to get search engines to think that their site is important for certain keyword phrases so that they appear at the top of a search engine results page. Roughly two-thirds of surfers click on a link on the first page of the results and 90% click on a link on the top three pages (link to citation). You don’t have to pay money whenever someone clicks on your link as you do with paid search, but depending on how competitive your market is (or how many other sites are also trying to get high rankings for those keyword phrases), you may have to put in a considerable amount of work to get your site ranked high.

So how do you know whether to do paid search or SEO? Attentive marketers will use a combination of the two by covering some keywords with SEO and others with paid search. You might want to focus on the few very competitive keyword phrases with SEO, and cover the rest using paid search, especially if there are a lot of non-competitive terms. Alternatively, the important terms may be so difficult for you to get good organic results on, that you might not want to bother doing SEO for them, but rather just pay to get listed against them. Or maybe you don’t want to bother with the competitive keywords at all, and find that you can get a good boost in business just be focusing on residual keyword phrases (that is, keyword phrases that are relevant, but have a lower query volume). This is a rather involved subject, which deserves further discussion, so I will dive deeper into it in a later chapter.

I mentioned in chapter 2 that all that’s required to get listed in the local search engines is a simple submission. However, getting a more prominent placement than a standard listing is an option as well. In Google Local, you can do this through their paid search platform, Adwords. In Yahoo Local, you can currently get a premium placement for $25 per month. See some screenshots of this below.

Here is a an example of a paid search ad in Google Local, which apparently is now the same as Google Maps.

Here is an example of a premium placement on Yahoo Local.

(last updated 8-16-06)