What are some effective ways to get organic traffic from areas near your business?
According to Rand Fishkin of Moz, Google’s Location Targeting is the biggest opportunity marketers are missing. By taking advantage of this opportunity you can dominate highly competitive search terms. The tactics here are known as Local SEO.
For example, imagine you own a window cleaning business in Tampa. When someone searches for “Tampa window cleaner” one of the top results is Yelp’s entry for a company from Houston.
If you did not know about this opportunity and tried to get your result on page 1 of Google Search, chances are you’d hardly get any traffic and lose out to the established business.
However, if you do know about this opportunity and have a plan in place to dominate the local search results for YOUR city, you can blow away your competition.
So what’s involved? Let’s break it down…
Local SEO takes advantage of Google My Business listings so that you rank higher in searches on google.com as well as Google Maps. When you do this, instead of getting traffic from the same pool of people who are searching for terms like “Tampa window cleaner” you get traffic from searches on google.com such as “window cleaner in Tampa”. The best step is to work with SEO Tampa experts for the ebay results.
You may ask yourself – ok but how do I get into Google My Business? It’s time-consuming to claim all your listings one by one.
A better approach would be to get all of them claimed in bulk using an Excel spreadsheet and Google Spreadsheet Merge.
With this tool, you can upload a list of business names (the name you want listed within Google My Business) and the tool will automatically take care of claiming all of them. Best of all, the tool is free to use and fully automated.
How do you get a list of your business names (the one’s you want listed in Google My Business)? There are two ways:
1) You can find these on your website – the name of every page should be the same as your business name (e.g. “Dish Pizzeria” should have a page named “about-us”). If you do not have a website, you can use local listing sites such as yelp and yell to get the list of names you need.
2) You can take advantage of the Link Prospector to scrape the first page of Google for your 4-5 most important keywords. For example, you could search for “Dallas window cleaner” and click on all of the pages that come up in the top 100 results.
Once you have this list, merge it into a single spreadsheet using the Google Spreadsheet Merge tool mentioned above, upload it to Google My Business and get ready for traffic!
You can begin building your local SEO solutions by choosing the keywords you want to target. Local SEO may be complex but it is also one of the most rewarding strategies.
There are plenty of tools out there that claim to help with local seo – some are better than others.