Chapter 10
Finding Traffic via Geo-Targeting
In This Chapter
Understanding how local search works
Optimizing your pages for geo-targeting
Submitting to local search systems
I
ncreasingly the Internet is being used as a tool for finding local resources.
Not just for finding information, or for buying online, you can use it to find
homes for sale in your neighborhood, local independent insurance agents,
stores close to you that sell the products you need, and so on. And so it’s
increasingly important to keep geo-targeting in mind when optimizing for the
search engines — that is, to not only target by a searcher’s keyword, but by
the searcher’s geographic location.
Wait! But before you skip this chapter because you have a purely online busi-
ness, you need to understand the two basic reasons you should consider
geo-targeting:
Because you have a local business
Because your prospects — your target customers — search locally
Say you are a local business. You sell insurance in your town, or own a local
health-food store, or are a personal trainer with clients within a 5-mile radius.
Clearly you don’t need to rank well on the terms insurance, health food, or
personal training. You need to rank well on the terms insurance denver, health
food waco, or personal training paducah. There’s no point competing for gen-
eral terms against hundreds of thousands of other companies when you’re
interested in a fraction of the searches.
But say you’re not a local shop for local people. You sell to anyone, any-
where. But you may find that the people you want to reach don’t search for
generic terms. They search for generic terms in combination with local terms.
This is something you may discover if you do a good keyword analysis, which
I describe in Chapter 5. Most people don’t search for lawyers, for instance;
they search for lawyers in a particular city. They don’t search for real estate
agents; they search for real estate agents in a particular city. They don’t
search for insurance; they search for insurance in a particular state or city.
