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If you have a website trying to attract business to a brick and mortar business, the competition for your local SEO campaign is obvious, right? You are competing against all the other companies in your geographical areas who offer the same services and products that you are offering. These are the businesses that you have perhaps competed against for customers over a number of years in the offline advertising world. Many now have their own websites with their own SEO professionals and their own campaigns using the same localized keywords you are now targeting.
This is where the knowledge of many local businesses ends. They understand who they are competing against in their local area because they have been competing with them for years or did a comprehensive analysis of the competition before going into business in that location. The problem is they are only seeing half the picture when it comes to marketing online.
A local SEO campaign is very different from taking out ads in local papers and putting up signs at the local grocery store. When you market online you are competing with many other websites and businesses from all over the world. You are essentially competing with anyone using any of the keywords on your keyword list. It doesn’t matter where they are located.
Many businesses focus on getting more traffic or more sales than another business located down the street, but they don’t see that online businesses, informational websites, and businesses from thousands of miles away are stealing a lot of their online attention. Even if they do beat out the competitor down the street, they are missing out on tons of online traffic and potential sales that should rightfully be theirs.
If you are an offline business in the online marketing world, chances are you relate to this missing piece of the puzzle. The truth is, local businesses marketing online are competing with many other websites competing for attention over the same keywords. If you are not sizing up all of that competition along w with the competitors down the street and one town over, then you are missing out on a lot of online traffic your website could be attracting.
Here’s the big question: if you are a local business trying to attract people from your geographical area into your brick and mortar shop, why would you care about people located miles away or in another country that may be stealing some of your online thunder? You should care because by giving them that share of the online market you are giving them some of your local market as well. Some people who would like to walk into your shop will miss out because they found the website for someone a hundred or a thousand miles away rather than finding your website.
Local Strategy
It is important to just see this bigger picture, even if you aren’t in a position to do anything about it at first. This will give you a better appreciation of what you are up against.
An effective local online marketing SEO strategy is to focus on localized keywords with a geographical indicator and slowly branch out to more generalized keywords.
For example, a company offering motor repairs and replacements may start with Charlotte NC motor replacement and branch out to the more generalized motor replacement keyword, which would be a lot more competitive.