Making Local Search Work Harder For Your Small Business

Most Sparkplugging readers are…well, small.  Call it consultant, micro-business, or whatever you like.  Freelancers are small businesses that can benefit from a very small amount of business.  Today I’d like to show you how to snag some highly targeted web traffic that will get you some great business – and it’s something you should be able to accomplish by yourself within a few hours.

My last post was on getting yourself added to the Google Local Business Directory.  Today I want to focus on how to expand that local presence.

What you’ll need:

• A website.
• Access to your website’s code, or at least the back end visual editor.  If you don’t make any changes to your website, you’ll need the person who makes those changes.
• Internet Access

Most freelancers work in competitive niches like writing, real estate, or consulting of some sort.  For this example I want to use the real estate industry to show how you can find buyers.

First, let’s do a little research. Do you know what people who are looking for your goods & services type into search engines?  Google will tell you, for free.  Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal# and use the free keyword tool to get an idea.  Start by typing in what you sell or provide. In this case, I’ll start with ‘Real Estate.’  I get this result.

Notice that at the top it shows me the average number of searches for the terms ‘real estate’ and ‘real estates.’  These are the exact matches for what I was searching for.  The neat thing is that lower down it also gives me a huge list of thing that Google says people also type when searching for real estate.  Wouldn’t you love to be found on the first page of Google when someone searches those things?  The big national real estate franchises like Remax, Coldwell Banker and others certainly love it.

Again, you can do this with any industry. Try it again with ‘counseling,’ ‘copy writing,’ ‘graphic design’ or whatever it is that you do.  The Keyword Tool will generate a list of keywords that relate to your industry.

Now, the next part that I am going to show you really only works for small markets where the competition is not too fierce, but it should work for many of you.  If you live in Los Angeles, NYC, or another major metro, you’ll need to do more than just this, but this is a good start.

Do the search again, but add a geo targeted qualifier to it.  That simply means add a city or zip code.  I picked a small town in Tennessee called Crossville (population 10,433).

Notice that the numbers drop dramatically?  It means its far less competitve.  If you could show up on the first page of 5000+ searches and get around 5 – 10% of those people to click through to your site, would you be happy?  I thought so.

Your next step is store those keywords you want to target.  You can click add next to all of them and it will generate a list on the right which you can then download as a text file or as a .csv (Excel) file.  You can also just write them down if you want to target just the top few.

Now you want to add these keywords to your website.  On your Home, About and Contact page, put in a few sentences about how you are a real estate agent that specializes in the Crossville area, and then rearrange that sentence in a few different ways.  Make sure that each page has different content.  A good example could be:

Cory Huff is a Crossville Real Estate Agent with over 10 years experience helping buyers locate homes for sale in Crossville, Lake Holiday, and Woodlawn.  Located at the intersection of Interstate 40 and State Highway 127, Crossville, Tennessee is a beautiful city that is growing like crazy and we have new real estate deals on beautiful homes and land for sale in the Crossville area.

You know your market, so write for your own customers, but you get the idea.  Google loves this local search stuff, and in a small market this can often be enough to get you the traffic you need.

Further ideas:

• Create a blog that you update once a week with posts about the local real estate market.  Make sure you put these keywords in the title and at the top of the posts.  For example, you might do a blog post about how Obama’s recent tax credits will affect the homes for sale in your current market, and lead with the title, “Homes for Sale under Obama’s Tax Plan.”
• If you’ve added yourself to the Google Local Business Directory, go back and add some of these keywords to your listing in the description and categories sections.
• Get other websites to link to your site using your keywords as the anchor text like I do here with my blog, TheAbundantArtist.com, which contains posts on the best day jobs for actors.

It will take a few weeks to a couple of months for you to start to see results from this work, but it’s well worth it when you start getting phone calls!  Please bookmark this post and come back after you start seeing results, and let us know how it works out for you!

Cory Huff, Sparkplugging.com intern, works as a blogger & social media guy for Netbiz.com, a company focused on search engine marketing for small businesses.  He’s also a trained actor and writes about the intersection of money & art at TheAbundantArtist.com.