When marketing a local business, it is important that the local aspect not be forgotten in the local search engine marketing strategy. It can become too easy to forget about the importance of using local sources to help in a local campaign. It is easy to forget or ignore the local aspect because it can require more work. �However, those things are going to help bring long-term results that will stick.
Building Local Relationships
One of the toughest things to do for a search agency working to gain rankings for local clients is to build relationships. This is best done by the people of the company themselves. �Relationships are much easier to establish from one local business owner to another. For this reason, it is a good idea to discuss with the owners of the business the importance of building relationships and how to then turn that into a link or citation from that business�s website. This may require some training and sharing ideas on strategies that may be used to accomplish this.
Sources of Local Signals for Search
When a search engine is looking at a local search term and trying to rank websites, they are going to rely heavily on local signals to help them verify that a website is relevant one a local level for that search phrase. This is to make sure that an irrelevant company, not located in Dallas, TX, does not show up for searches that obviously indicate that the searcher is looking for companies in the Dallas, TX, area. �Some of the signals the search engines uses to determine locality of a business, and therefore relevance, include the location of the IP address of the website, the listing of the physical address in the website, especially if done within the proper HTML markup, and links from websites that have been verified to be in the area. Because this is the case, local search engine marketing can be difficult for Internet marketers if a business owner becomes uncooperative. It is crucial for a business owner to understand how much they can help their own cause on the Internet by developing strong local relationships.