Almost all cell phones today have some kind of internet connectivity with them. Keep in mind that most people do not carry laptops around with them at all times, but instead use their cell phones or smart phones to check their email, update their Twitter, or browse the internet for places to eat or shop. Companies that have developed mobile applications for use in cell phones (especially free applications) can create brand awareness for their product or service and receive an adamant fan following from people on the go. The key to creating good mobile apps is creativity. Users want something that is simple, useful, and keeps their interest. Try not to make an app that is too large to fit onto a person’s mobile device, otherwise it risks being deleted (there is only so much space and priority listed for apps).

Text messages (or SMS messages) is also another way to use mobile marketing to drive visitors to your website. Whether you’re updating people with news or information about your product, text messaging is a way to instantly update via the net, especially when phones are set to alert users immediately when a message is received.

Also consider the fact that mobile marketing is the supreme road to take for hyper local search. In fact, you’re building the potential to attract numerous amounts of customers in and around your location who are more likely to engage in your product or service if you have a mobile application.

Link building can be simple and easy if you use the right resources. If you have the money, you can pay for pay-per-click advertising with banner ads on search engines or websites. This is a good way to generate buzz and traffic to your website that could build links. Paying for listings in directories is another popular way to get visitors to your site too.

If you have a small business or have a strict budget, you can create tags on similar sites on websites like Del.icio.us. People may follow the tags back to your website providing another opportunity for link building. Another free way to link build is to post your website in the directory listing on Craigslist or, if you have a substantial topic, creating a Wikipedia page that links back to your site. Forums are also another popular way to build links to your website especially if your site has a particular expertise about a certain topic.

Building business links can be as simple as submitting your link to relevant state and city government resources or joining the Better Business Bureau. If you have any business relationships with non-competing businesses in the your field, then you can request links from them to help build links in your community.

Public Relations websites are another great way to submit press releases about any upcoming news and topics relating to your website. You may have to pay to submit your press release to particular websites, but it’s a great way to get your name out in the industry.

Link building can be a tedious task, but is necessary to sustain the life of your website and get your name out in the local area. By building links of quality sites, you can be sure that your website is getting the amount of traffic you need to generate awareness of your topic.

The thing we found was that there are well over one hundred people a month searching for variations of this companies name online yet before they had a website the company had no idea where they were going.

Think about this for a minute, there are people actively looking for your business and if your website is not optimized properly or if you do not have a web presence at all there is no way for your potential customers to find you.

The business I am talking about here was a very offline business, a drilling and blasting company, when we put the site together they really were just looking to have a small site setup online but we told them it would end up being their advertising online, their way of promoting their business. They were skeptical.

Not now, they indicated they are getting many calls from the site now, customers were looking before they just were not finding this company, who knows they may of been finding a competitor in local search listings. How much business does a business loose if someone is looking for them over and over again online but can never find them.

As search engine optimizers we tend to focus on keywords and search volume for certain search terms, in many cases a persons business is searched on enough that the value is in just being found.

Is your business being found online in all the places it should be? If not talk to us about local search optimization.

In the past it has always been about eyeballs, there was no targeting, at least not in the sense we talk about today. If you were to advertise in the newspaper or on the radio you were advertising across a large region and you bought the ad based on eyeballs or listeners even if those people had no interest in your product or even if they just happened to be passing through town.

This is the model most small business owners are typically most familiar with. The web changes all of this.

Now, with local search taking a larger role in online search queries making sure you are found when people search for a service or product in Bing, Google, or Yahoo is more important than any newspaper ad someone could run. And one statistic says a lot as well, 80 percent of people in one survey reported searching online to research a product or service then going locally to buy it.

If your business cannot be found online then it is likely they are not going to your business to buy it.

With local search and hyperlocal targeting you can make sure that when people search for your business online that they find your web presence. Making sure your business shows up in the Google local listings (or Bing and Yahoo) is very important, but with people becoming even more targeted in their search making sure you show up at a neighborhood level in major metros and even in rural areas can be very important if someone is looking for a local service or restaurant.

It is not about having hundreds of thousands of people reading the newspaper and possibly seeing your ad with the web, on the web when someone searches in the search engines they know exactly what they are looking for which means if your business can get that traffic to your website then the conversion ratio is much higher than you may be used to in legacy methods of advertising.

By building your website in a way that attracts the people searching in your local area you can make sure that the customers you are looking for find you and not your competitor. These customers convert, you want them to be yours.

In the past advertising solutions have been about one thing, eyeballs. That is how people determined what they charged for their advertising product. The more eyeballs the better, right?

Well, local search engine optimization has changed that and turned it on its head. With the ability to optimize a website to show up in the search engine listings when people search for specific items in your local area you can receive higher converting visitors to your ad or website at a lower cost.

Why pay a newspaper thousands of dollars for an ad that you are not sure that anyone even cares about when for much less you can optimize your real estate website to be in the first page of Google search results when someone searches for the exact subdivision you are selling a house in.

With the economy, and especially real estate in a very tough downturn finding more cost effective, high converting, marketing solutions is very important. Being able to use local search engine optimization to target people searching for the exact location you are selling a property in is the best way.

If you are not thinking about this it is likely that your competitor is. With more and more people becoming more web savvy people are understanding that the search engines are not a technical subject anymore, they are your marketing tool. They have taken over for the newspapers and billboards of the past.

I you are interested in marketing your real estate website to the people searching for exactly what you are trying to sell then contact us for local search engine optimization.

To a good accounting firm one click driven to contact you for business services could turn into your next 30 thousand dollar client, if you cannot get them to do more than browse your website though then you have lost your chance, most companies are not in the business of educating, they are in the purpose of driving business growth.

Whether you are an accounting firm, a restaurant, or a pet groomer, at the end of the day once they arrive at your website you need to do something to either gather their information or drive them to contact you or in some cases buy on the spot.

In this case the customers current website provider would not allow them access to their site to modify it to properly set it up to target high conversion local customers. First off this is really pathetic to me, once a customer pays for a site it is THEIR site and they have every right to do anything they want to with it, but I digress.

To make up for the fact they could not modify their site we worked up a plan to build separate landing page sites to target locally targeted search traffic that would convert better for them and built a simple call to action banner in the site. The site did not need to be complex, a couple pages highly focused on converting customers is what it was all about.

Results?

Well, by using the landing page approach we were able to target the right customers and provide them with a way to easily contact the firm with a phone call or contact form. By doing this they now receive more customer contact from this one highly targeted, lower traffic site than they do from their primary website which gets 5 times the traffic.

In summary, it is important to provide mechanisms for customers to contact you by providing a compelling reason. This combined with targeting high conversion search terms is a sure fire success plan.

In fact it is likely that if you live in an area with many small towns located around your  place of business you want to try to get customers from the surrounding towns as well.

Many small business make the mistake of optimizing focused purely on the town they are in, for instance they may have the title of their site be:

Smalltown Restaurants

But if you speak to the business owner for any amount of time you will find that they are also interested in growing their business by attracting customers from surrounding communities.

If that is the case there are multiple options, even if you have just one location. A couple quick tips:

Build multiple pages with unique content that is focused on that specific town, optimize the title keywords appropriately. This could be as simple as announcing a local community event you will be sponsoring or attending.

Another option for less competitive areas is to have multiple city/niche combinations in the site title, expanding on the example above:

Smalltown1 Restaurants, Smalltown2 BBQ | MyDinerRestaurant1.com

Although a very minor change it can make  a difference for your small business when attracting surrounding customers. We have had customers have immediate results from such minor changes such as this.

Many people have not used Geo Tags but now that local search is forcing more businesses into utilizing their web presence more effectively Geo Tags will be something more and more web developers start to utilize.

Here is an example of how the meta tags look when in use:

<meta name="geo.placename" content="Park Hills, Missouri">
<meta name="geo.region" content="US-M0">
<meta name="geo.position" content="37.84930;-90.52660">

As you can see the “geo.placename” tag allows the insertion of the town or city that the site is targeting.

The “geo.region” tag allows the developer to specify the region, in this case Missouri.

And lastly, the “geo.position” tag allows the latitude and longitude to be set.

Although it is still unclear how much weight the search engines put into these tags it is important that you utilize what tools are available to develop your site properly.

For more information on Geo Tags visit:

Geotagging – Wikipedia

From the day to day interactions I have had with customers my experience has been that it is best to start with a few minor changes to get things moving and then over time work to integrate more advanced web development techniques for making sure your business is found online.

With local search growing fast (in 2008 the growth rate was 58%) it is important that your site is properly setup so that the search engines can determine where you are located and what types of services you offer to your customers. If you are not doing this properly or do not have a website at all there is a real good chance your competitors are showing up when it should be you.

So, with that we here at HyperlocalSEO.com are focused on providing you with real world, easily implemented tips to helping you build customer growth for your business, even if you are the most offline of business.

Our first tip is a simple one, make sure that you put your address on each and every page of your site, or at a minimum on the About Us and Contact Us page.

This one thing can make all the difference in the world in how the search engines view your site, it can be as simple as the following:

Address:

ABC Company

1234 ABC Drive

Flat Rock, AZ 87733

Phone: 555-555-5555

Although that will work great in the content on your contact us and about us pages another couple great options would be to :

• Put a site wide text box in your navigation menu bar on the left or right of your site
• Put the address horizontally across your footer

I have witnessed both of these work for customers.

For more information visit us at Localtek.com where we provide local search optimized web design for our customers in Missouri.