The already competitive nature of the business world has been radically transformed by the internet. Small businesses can now compete against national companies with a little help from local search engine optimization marketing. This has levelled the playing field somewhat. Multi-national companies targeting a large geographical area or country cannot always optimize their websites to target regional areas.

Say for example a national web design company was targeting the whole of the US for website building and you are operating in a more regional specific area, then you can compete with them and most likely beat them in Google for web design + the region your business is in. You should beat them hands down on relevancy alone.

I mean if you are in Fort Worth Texas, you should be winning the search engine battle for “web design Fort Worth” against a company targeting the whole of the US. Here’s why. Google operates on supplying the most relevant results to the search engine browser. Back in the old days crooked webmasters could rank in the search engines via a process called keyword stuffing. So when you typed in “cheap holidays” for instance you could navigate via the search results to the top listed website hoping to book your next vacation. On arrival to your horror you may notice that the website is actually an e commerce site for mobile phones.

This practice became redundant when Google stepped into the game and became the market leader. So how do you make your website relevant to your geo targeted area? Well via your on page content and page titles of course. Very importantly is your contact info. Fill in your contact page with your actual physical address and you’re screaming at Google that your business is relevant particularly to this area. Stick your website details up on a few directory sites and this will reinforce the fact that you are operating in a specific area. It won’t disallow you from competing on a national scale, but it should stop multi-nationals with no relevance to your area muscling you out of the top slots.

The king of all methods in making your site relevant to your region is by adding a free Google places page. This is simple to do, all you need is a free Google account, you don’t need to pay web optimization experts to do this, you can do it by following Google’s instructions. But what if you want to target your website on a national level like the rest of the major brand companies? You can still do this by targeting key web pages on your site to industry generic terms. But don’t overlook your local area. Supply the needs to your own market and you’ll never grow hungry.

Remember if big corporate brand names want to target every region in the country via their website they will have to build a separate page on their site to do this. Their site would be thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of pages big. It would be a mess, or look like a huge directory and lose the focus of what it is trying to achieve.

Author Bio: Ed is a search engine optimization specialist in the UK. His seo consultants firm uses strategic white hat techniques to ensure search engine success.

Category: Internet
Keywords: seo, search engine optimization, search engine optimisation, seo strategies, seo techniques, links