The days on the Yellow Pages and Business Pages are fast diminishing. More people today turn to the search engines to find local service providers and products.

Therefore getting to grips with local search has never been so important. How geared up it your website and online marketing activities up for local searches?

The best way to make the most of your local search potential is to own as much of the web as possible.

Boosting your online presence

One of the best ways to boost your profile online is to increase the number of web pages you have. That doesn’t mean to say you need a hulking great big website that’ll cost a fortune, but rather a number of pages that relate to your business.

Let me explain.

You can use the power of other websites to increase your online presence. This can be through using Web 2.0 sites such as Squidoo or Hub Pages or other ‘directory’ style sites such as www.myProSpot.com.

This is just one example of a ‘directory’ style website you can utilise to boost your online presence. It allows you to add your company details as many directories do,but by becoming a Platinum member (the site also offers a free membership) you can grab yourself a micro site for your company.

Here’s the one I set up for my freelance copywriting business. Now, not only do I have my own copywriter website, but I also own more of the web through my myProSpot web pages.

These sites are brilliant for local businesses because they allow you to own much more of the web cheaply. Not only will it help with your SEO, it also has great features such as customer feedback – so you can compete against the big boys through your feedback.

About 40% of all small businesses don’t have a website

Considering the online age we’re living in, that’s a very scary statistic. But why should it be like that? Even if you don’t have the budget for a stand-alone site right now, utilising a site like myProSpot will get you online – fast.

t really is worthwhile looking into setting up profiles on sites such as this one – there are plenty out there.

If you are a business owner looking to get into online marketing and, in particular, search engine optimisation, don’t forget to think local.

More and more people are searching for local companies through the search engines so it’s never been more important to ensure you have a strong local SEO presence on the web.

Many companies concentrate their SEO efforts on fairly generic terms that relate to their products and services but forget about their geographical details.

With the advent of increased and improved mobile search, it is vital you stand out in your local area. And the best way to do that is by utilising the power of local search.

Location, location, location

If your company covers a specific geographical location, make sure those details are added to your HTML through page titles. You should also try and use these details within your copy and headings but be sensible.

Remember you are first and foremost writing for your reader – if you over do it, the page will look clumsy. Other areas for location information are within the footer along with your address and also within your internal hypertext linking structure. Instead of linking freelance copywriter, use a geographical reference such as Suffolk freelance copywriter.

YouTube

You can also boost your online presence through marketing. Upload your video to YouTube and then use very localised tags – without being spammy. The chances are (depending on the competitiveness of your keywords) you’ll be able to get these ranked and the more entries you can get on a front page local search results, the fewer your competitors can have.

Wider areas

If your business covers several geographical areas you could consider creating specific landing pages for each area. They should have unique content (you don’t want to fall foul of the duplicate content trap) and optimised for each specific area. Hypertext links within these pages can then drive your visitors to your main website.

Boost your profile

Social networking sites make it easy to spread your business name to a wide audience. Set up social media profiles which relate to your geographical region. But, as with the landing page content, make sure each description is different. You should also utilise Google Places, Yahoo local, and Bing Local to boost your local profile.

Remember to always think local by adding location modifiers to your keywords.