Mar
22
2009

SEO Magic of Going Local

Going Local in Keyword Research and Link Building:
SEO Tip to Improve Your Business Profits

This week was very interesting for our keyword research team, because several keywords research clients (without knowing each other) demanded to make a local keyword research. Surely they know that they do, because for their business local searches give very good money.

Then we thought “But many Free Traffic System users can also have local online businesses” and once realizing this, we decided to share how to do keyword research for local keywords and how to benefit from it.

Is My Business Ok for Local Keywords?

Before you “go local” in keyword research and link building, you should understand that not every business is ok to go local. Usually it is the real businesses which has local coverage (car repair, event agency, fitness club, food delivery) that will seriously benefit from getting local visitors to their site.

This is simple. If you have a car repair company in Denver it makes no sense to fight for the very competitive keyword “car repair”, because:
- this is a very difficult keyword
- your traffic will be very untargeted (yes, they are interested in car repair service, but if they are on another coast – what’t the point of such client?)

Local Keywords = Low Link Building Competition!

And this is a serious advantage for you – the user of Free Traffic System – who can quite quickly build many backlinks with the necessary keyword in the anchor text of the backlinks. Your other local competitors (if they are not users of our system) can do nothing against you.

Let’s use the example of car repair. This screenshot shows the link building competition for ‘car repair’:

As you can see, the competition is serious – almost 6,000,000 web pages that have incoming links with this keywords. We do not say it is impossible to take Google page 1 for this keyword, but this is a day-to-day link building work that has to be carried on for months (at least, 2-3 months).

And now the keyword of ‘car repair denver’, and the screenshot shows it all…

That seems to be much better than 6 mln :) And if you have a car repair service in Denver, then you are lucky, because we have found you a keyword for free :)

It does not mean that for any local keyword you are going to have this kind of low link building competition. But this competition will be lower than the competition for the general, non-local keywords.

Local Keywords = Better Conversions!

This is simple, but we decided to highlight this issue. Of course, local searches are not huge – they are 10 – 100 – 1,000 – 10,000+ times smaller than the global search for a keyword. That is why do not expect huge traffic to pour in, when you get page 1 for a local keyword.

But each of these visitors are real gold, because by doing a local search it gets obvious that they are targeted people in your region who are interested in local service. If they are in Denver, they will not go to New York or California, or Canada. They need your help right here – in Denver. They are your golden visitors!

So, once you have found these local keywords. Login to your Free Traffic System account and start building backlinks with the researched keyword(s) in the anchor text of the backlinks.

P.S. If you want to hire our team for keyword research – visit this page for more details.

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18 Responses to “SEO Magic of Going Local”

  1. Foreclosure Information said on March 22nd, 2009 4:55 pm

    Good post for the local business. Could even open up opportunity for doing some SEO contracting for businesses in ones home town.

  2. FIF2002 said on March 22nd, 2009 5:04 pm

    What if I don’t have anything to sale?

  3. derrick said on March 22nd, 2009 5:37 pm

    Don’t forget you can use FTS to get you to the top of google local also.

  4. Admin said on March 22nd, 2009 6:21 pm

    Answer to FIF2002

    You can always resell traffic to someone who has a product or service.

  5. Christopher said on March 22nd, 2009 7:08 pm

    I think this is great and i’m going to be trying it out very soon.

  6. Buddy said on March 22nd, 2009 7:09 pm

    thanks for this it bumped me up a few places in google

  7. Ann said on March 22nd, 2009 7:18 pm

    Good points! I am local but want to target boaters to my area so it could work very well for me.

  8. dreamscaper said on March 22nd, 2009 7:59 pm

    I completely agree with your observations about the importance of local traffic targeting – but I believe that you are too quick to dismiss the value of the short tail keyword for a local business; I only say this because if you are using adsense on your site then a visitor to your site should hopefully be shown geotargeted ads from google during their visit which would still possibly motivate them to click on the ad. So the guy in Denver with a website focused on a Denver based business would still benefit from adsense if the visitor to his site from New York was seeing NY targeted adsense ads and ended up clicking on one of them to follow up the ad. (realistically, you would probably click out on an ad if the site didnt seem very relevant to you geographically) True, to rank well would be competitive but it is possibly not so tough depending on the niche.

    Sorry if this seems like nitpicking, I just wanted to throw that out there. Thanks for starting this discussion in the first place.

  9. Ralph Morton said on March 22nd, 2009 8:13 pm

    Once again, those great ideas keep flowing,

    Thanks
    Ralph

  10. Jamie said on March 22nd, 2009 9:11 pm

    Local keywords are great, I run my business around them, we can almost guarantee to get your local business online and on page 1 within days. As you can see geo targeting your keywords makes for much less competition within the market.

    Good luck with it.

    ps if you need help with local SEO visit
    http://www.networkingwithprofit.com/localseo/index.html

  11. Vegar said on March 22nd, 2009 10:16 pm

    A good opportunity here is to start a local directory of different proffesions. If your town has more than 20.000 you can probably with ease sell an advertising spot for 500 dollars a year for the term “car repair town”. You can go broad in this and include tons of relevant keywords. Car rental, truck rental, delivery service, hair dresser, bridal service, funural agency… you can probably build 500 pages on your site and get most of them to rank.

    Let each advertiser get a logo, some information text, a phone number and an address + a link to their website and email.

    Sell the spots on each page. This is a lot of work, but when people start using your site, and the local business owners start to see your site rank, the advertisers will come to you.

  12. Haron said on March 23rd, 2009 7:23 am

    That’s a very good finding. This is what we call analysing your competition or Competition Intelligence.

  13. gary lewis said on March 24th, 2009 4:14 pm

    I think I will change my tactics and start doing geo targeted keywords! Cheers guys :-)

  14. CD Rates said on March 24th, 2009 5:50 pm

    Excellent information. It is probably hard to use the free tools to estimate traffic, but you can pretty much figure that service type, local targeted traffic will produce.

    Think dentists, car repair, bikes, bakeries, restuarants, the sky is the limit.

    Great post.

  15. Nose Hair Clipper said on April 7th, 2009 3:50 am

    It always amazes me that people running sites/businesses so often completely ignore local searches. Talk about leaving money on the table! Excellent post and a timely reminder, especially now when the economy is down and everyone is looking for that extra edge.

  16. derrick said on April 18th, 2009 11:33 am

    inside of two weeks i’ve got around 50 #1 spots from going local in my profession

  17. derrick said on April 18th, 2009 11:44 am

    This didn’t put alot of traffic on my site but that’s not what I was looking for. I was looking for targeted traffic I got over 600 visitors out of the 50 number 1 local keywords I put up this month and it only took 2 weeks to get them to the top, some happened in days. That translated into thousands of dollars for my business from just 1 customer and this is just the first month. For me local ranking is king and you can keep your global ranking and special thanks to the guys at FTS for understanding that it’s not always about the numbers some times it’s a narrow audience you need to achieve your goals.

  18. affordable seo services chicago said on June 20th, 2009 7:21 pm

    This is great information. I do a little seo consulting for local businesses and I think this would work great and save me a bunch of time which should allow me to go after more business. Good work!