Owning a small business in most towns means you rely on customers from surrounding towns and areas for a significant portion of your business. Back in the “Yellow Pages” days that meant spending a small fortune promoting your business in those areas.
Now, a business can use online marketing to reach potential customers in an expanded market in a very cost-effective manner… IF you follow a simple strategy.
You could build a web page that simply included the names of your target cities and a few keywords or phrases that you would like to rank highly for. And it just might work. I’ve used this technique and it got me into the top five for my keywords in a fairly competitive market. But the competition was weak.
That was then and this is now. The chances of success using that technique have shrunk. It may still get you into the top 20 in your chosen markets, but that is no longer good enough. You now need to give your business the best chance to rank highly for an array of keywords that potential customers are likely to use when searching for your product or service.
Keywords are not a guessing game. Starting with some logical basic keywords, we need to use effective tools to expand the selection of keywords that we start out with. Once we have a a list of actual keywords gleaned from logs of real users of our website, we add those to the mix.
“Mix” is undoubtedly the wrong word to use as the get the best effect on ranking each keyword or key word set needs it’s own web page. For example, if you were trying to rank highly for the the keyword “blue widget,” you would need a web page dedicated to that keyword set and not try to include “red widget” or “blue thingamajig.” You’ll get much better results if you create separate pages for each keyword set.
A web page designed for a single keyword set should also have a keyword-rich, filename, title and content. The content should offer information of value to visitors landing on it and should be created for real visitors, not search engine robots.
Here’s an example of a web page created for a single keyword set:
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And the resulting Google ranking:
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In these two images you can clearly see the advantage of having web pages that are optimized to BOTH a locality and a keyword set. Do not attempt to create pages like this that have similar content but simply redirect to another page. The content in meant for the search engine robots and will never be seen by visitors to the page. Those are called “doorway” pages. Google doesn’t like “doorway” pages as they contain no content of value to visitors and they will quickly eliminate them from their database – and possibly penalize your entire site.
So, if you want to market to different locations in your area, use a separate web page for each keyword set (product or service) and location (city, town, county, etc.). Just be sure that each page has content of value to a visitor and is optimized for the keyword set it is meant to promote.
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