The fine art of Local Search
Do you want to reach prospective customers in the Milton Keynes area who are already looking for the product or service that you sell?
Selling to someone who is already looking for what you’ve got is A LOT easier than selling to someone who’s totally alien to your product or even your whole industry – this much, we all know.
If you’ve tried a little search engine marketing before then you already know a route to achieve this – it’s the basic reason that we all build sites with content that’s relevant to our respective keyword list. And we can all list a lot of keywords that are targeted and relevant, right?
If this isn’t new to you so far then that’s GREAT! Stacks and stacks of small-medium size businesses in Milton Keynes don’t even have a website, or have something that is woefully inadequate for what they need.
Even more of them don’t take the time to include their full business address and business name as registered! Let alone including an attractive description, a unique selling point, a concise list of services and products offered, or just a few good reasons to buy.
So, if you’ve already done these things then you are very welcome to pat yourself on the back right now – because you’re doing good. However… there’s a gulf of difference between doing good as an advanced beginner and becoming proficient at marketing your business online.
This article assumes that you have a basic knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). It is not aimed at total beginners – there’s a lot of information out there already on taking those first few steps, much of which is put together so well that I wouldn’t be able to add any significant value.
Instead, I want to help you get to the next step, stay ahead of your competition and generate some real results for the time and effort that you put in.
I’m not going to detail step by step instructions to processes like creating a Google Places page. Partly because this kind of process changes so frequently that it’ll bare little relevance in a few months time, but more importantly because you can easily figure that out for yourself. Instead, I’m going to outline principals that I know are effective, and define some clear action steps that you can take to put them into place.
The key point that I want to share with you today is about relevancy. You too can migrate over to using laser-like, precision targeting to reach people who are the perfect match for what you have to offer. If that sounds like where you want to be, then let’s get started…
Relevancy
Despite the huge number of Milton Keynes businesses who are NOT online yet, there are still A LOT who are. Depending on the industry you work in, you’ll probably find that many of the keywords you first identified to target are quite competative. For small businesses this can be quite a challenge, because you’re unlikely to have the kind of writing and link-building people-power that you may need to compete.
My advice is to not worry about the very short, competative search terms when you’re starting out. Don’t forget about them altogether, just start out with terms that are a lot more achievable. Instead, think long and local!
Long Tail marketing for achievable local search results in Milton Keynes
You’re probably familiar with the idea of long-tail keywords. If you look at your existing organic search traffic for the last month in Google Analytics and switch the ‘Show Rows’ drop-down to ’500′, you’ll find a whole host of weird and wonderful terms that individual people Googled for and then clicked through to your site already. Some of them in that list are going to be highly obscure, so don’t concern yourself too much right now with what’s already listed on there other than to get an idea of what I’m talking about.
Why is the long-tail valuable?
Someone searching using a longer term is more likely to convert to a sale. It’s that simple. The reason is that the search result is likely to be more relevant, because it’s more specific. Here are a few examples…
“Shoes“ gives us 279 million results.
“Brown Oxford Shoes“ gives us 6 million results.
“Brown Oxford Shoes For Men“ gives us 3.5 million results.
“Brown Oxford Shoes For Men Milton Keynes“ gives us 50,600 results.
That is a massive shift in the number of results, with Google providing more and more relevant results as we give it more specific information to query.
As a result of my long search term, I’m able to find a business selling me some brown Oxfords based in Milton Keynes pretty quickly, unlike my first search for ‘Shoes’ that gave me only national level shoe stores and would require a lot of further digging to find out if they sold that style. By nature, longer terms give more relevant results.
So from the other side of the table, if a visitor finds your site through a long search term, then your site is much more likely to be relevant to what they’re looking for. With some luck, that means a perfect match!
7 Action Steps for Long Tail targeting
I’ve put together some action steps that you can use to start taking advantage of the long-tail…
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Expand your keyword targeting list – extensively!
Don’t just list 20 terms like ‘shoes’, instead work on listing lots of phrases that sound natural and that you feel are the kind of term someone might use to narrow a search for your product or service.
There are plenty of tools out there to help you do this, including the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool, which is free to use. Take a look at Wordtracker for a more professional and comprehensive tool designed for this task (rather than for PPC), though it’s a pay monthly / yearly subscription based service.
Start off by using a simple spreadsheet to list and track your site’s search result position for each keyword, and potentially also the positions that your major competitors have attained. Note that you should be logged out of Google while you check this – while you’re logged in Google improves the position of sites you’ve visited already so it will distort your data. Sadly this can be a bit time consuming if you’ve got a lot of keywords. Automated tools are available like SEOMoz, though also on an ongoing (relatively expensive) monthly subscription basis.
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Seed these new keywords into your content.
Keyword stuffing is bad – so don’t go overboard here, but you need to mention the longer keyword phrases that you’ve identified around your site where they are relevant.
- Write naturally.
If you stuff keywords repeatedly into your site all over the place, it’s going to be confusing for visitors or worse, have a negative impact on your search ranking. First and foremost your content needs to serve the people who will ultimately read it – i.e PEOPLE, not search engines. Writing naturally will throw many more long term combinations into the mix that you hadn’t planned for anyway.
- Write more.
There’s no point in flooding your site with low value content, but if you want to take advantage of long-tail search then you’ll need to maintain high quality, frequently published, fresh content. That means you’ll need to be writing regularly, so assign as much time to it as you can feasibly manage. Plan articles, note down ideas when they come to you, and write a couple ahead of publishing them if you want to maintain frequency whilst saving time and minimising your workload.
Do you struggle to think of subjects to write about? There is a wealth of information all over the net that aims to inspire you and help generate new ideas, though I find two things generally will prompt me to think of something new:
- Read other people’s blogs, compulsively – write down any particularly interesting subject ideas, eye catching headlines… anything that stands out and consider how you might apply something similar to an area of your own industry.
- Step away from the computer – don’t always rely on the internet for ideas, often the best ones come from referring to the real world, rather than referring to what others are doing online.
- Stay focused, but branch out.
Just because you’re writing more it doesn’t mean you should widen your subject matter infinitely. Stick to writing about topics that are highly relevant to your industry niche but do consider widening out to cover more variety within the same remit.
Too many blogs out there focus on just one thread – updates on what’s going on in the business, OR sales focused writing that details the latest and greatest of that business’ product lines, OR information pieces about their industry. Getting a balance between all of these (and more) will create a much more compelling content range, improve your posting frequency, attract a wider readership and give a reason for readers to keep coming back.
- Use longer anchor text for inbound links.
Don’t forget that when someone links to your site, they get to include anchor text as part of that link – which, you guessed it, should contain relevant keywords and doesn’t need to be just a single word. When building relationships with other site owners and bloggers, try guiding them to include keyword rich anchor text by providing link code they need to just drop it straight onto a page.
For example, this link code isn’t ideal…
<p>Take a look at these classic brown Oxford <a href="http://www.yoursite.com">shoes</a> for men right here in Milton Keynes</p>Instead, include the key terms in the anchor text itself, like this…
<p>Take a look at these <a href="http://www.yoursite.com">classic brown Oxford shoes for men right here in Milton Keynes</a></p> -
Use longer Titles, Headings and URLs
Your page’s title and heading tags are amongst the more important factors in on-page SEO, so don’t be afraid to make them a little longer and use those additional words to place a longer keyword term in full. Similarly this applies to the URLs you associate with posts and pages too, though please, please, please don’t go overboard here and make titles or URLs inconveniently long to work with for human readers.
Location based marketing for local search in Milton Keynes
Looking again at our ‘Shoes’ search example, did you spot the massive difference in the number of results between a local search and a non-geographic search? Let’s see again…
“Brown Oxford Shoes For Men“ gives us 3.5 million results.
“Brown Oxford Shoes For Men Milton Keynes“ gives us 50,600 results.
At the most basic level you can consider your location (Milton Keynes) as a critical part of your longer keyword terms and seed it throughout your content.
Local Search is going to work a lot better for some industry niches rather than others, so obviously apply common sense to consider if being a local supplier matters. Our shoe example is pretty ideal for someone looking for a local retailer, but other areas that people don’t associate with the idea of a local supplier may be far less powerful.
For example, “couture fashion shoe manufacturing milton keynes” is going to be much less searched-for because Milton Keynes is not renowned for this particular sector and because it is super-specific as a B2B prospect.
7 Action Steps for Location based targeting
Here are some key action steps that you can put into place to start improving your local search results right now…
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Set up a Google Places page for your business in Milton Keynes
If you haven’t done it yet, then getting your business indexed on Google Places can be really valuable. Google Places is considered the number one most valuable off-site index for influencing local search results.
This is going to make sure that your business appears on Google Maps, and is listed prominently on blended SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) when a geographic location is used in the search term.
You might find that your business is already indexed in here – in which case it makes sense to claim ownership of the listing as soon as possible.
Google will need to validate your new business listing by posting you a confirmation PIN – so allow at least a couple of weeks for this to arrive, then a day or so for your listing to be approved by a human moderation process in the first instance.
When all set up, complete your Google Places page as comprehensively as you possibly can – it is very much worth the time and effort to make it attractive to those who see it. Pick the most appropriate categories that you can (ideally pick most or all of them from the predefined options), add any extra information that may be relevant, and be sure to upload some relevant pictures too! If nothing else, a picture of your business logo will do to start with.
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Make sure your on-site Business Name, Address and Phone Number match with your Google Places listing.
This sounds obvious, but so many businesses get it mixed up, and it is critical to successful local search marketing. Google will verify the accuracy of your business site’s location by comparing it with the associated address and phone number in your Google Places page, so ensure that they are exactly the same.
DO NOT use a PO Box or anything that obscures your address so Google can’t locate it.
If you work from a home office and you prefer to not publish your home address then you might consider paying for a virtual office address somewhere locally to handle your mail and give you a prominent location upon which to centre your local search efforts.
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Get citations that confirm your business name, address and phone number elsewhere on the web.
The easiest option here is to submit your business details to carefully selected local business directories. As usual with any link building, avoid poor quality free directories (bad neighbourhoods) that list thousands of businesses across all manner of industries – stick with building relevancy and find places that are meaningful in their own right and might actually send a few visitors your way of their own accord!
Submitting your site to local Milton Keynes business directories like MKWEB and the Milton Keynes Citizen (miltonkeynes.co.uk) can be worthwhile but are going to charge you for indexing in fairly extensive, non-specific directories. Be sure to weigh up the potential value of that index to your overall efforts. If you are paying for either, make sure that any link to your site that’s included is NOT set to nofollow, otherwise you’ll experience absolutely zero beneficial effect to your search position at all from that index.
Some other directory sites like miltonkeynes.com are offering an indexing service that is better designed specifically to support local search. You can purchase a landing page like miltonkeynes.com/milton-keynes-driving-schools.html from them and use it to link to your business site exclusively – making it considerably more beneficial than being one link on a page of hundreds. You also get an opportunity to fill this landing page with as much content as you feasibly can, meaning you can optimise it for a decent search position in its own right.
Similarly, The Best Of Milton Keynes uses a human approval process to directly check out every business they index, and include single businesses per service category using do-follow links, so they’re a pretty strong bet for a good local link too.
Lastly, look for industry-specific local business directories if you can find them, as they’ll be perfectly optimised for both local search and long-tail terms related to your services and products.
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Google Places – Get reviewed and rated!
Ask some of your existing or former clients / customers to write a review of your business directly on your Google Places page, and to give a star rating. This will add both confirmation to Google that your business genuinely exists, that your details are correct, it will add more crawl-able content onto your Places page, and will have the dual benefit of obviously giving you more credibility when viewed by a prospective customer.
Honesty is valuable! Although you’re looking for positive reviews, it is essential that you do not attempt to post fake reviews or aggressively push people to leave a review – a gentle nudge of a genuinely happy customer will usually encourage an open appraisal of your services without being disingenuous or pretentious.
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Post location-specific content on your site.
You’re going to need plenty of good article ideas for your business blog that relate directly to your industry niche within the context of Milton Keynes.
Consider ways in which you might engage with other bloggers and site owners by responding to existing statements or joining a relevant ongoing conversation from elsewhere on the web, linking back to it.
You might consider some of these subjects as starting points…
- Why is your business located in Milton Keynes?
- How long have you been trading here? What has changed for your industry here in that time?
- What benefits have you enjoyed by being in your current location?
- Inversely, what challenges do you face being in Milton Keynes?
- Have you been part of any community related events in the past year?
- Do you have something to say about wider community, political or social issues that relate in some way to your industry but have a wider scope of interest?
All of these subjects can be potential hooks upon which to write compelling, locally related content and to hang location-specific keywords that aren’t just place names – consider mentioning notable people, landmarks or commonly known terms for places too if you believe that they could be relevant.
Depending upon your industry, it may even be worth publishing content that is super-local. For example, a Milton Keynes based electrician may want to discuss recently completed jobs in a specific estate or village like Stony Stratford, Newport Pagnell, Loughton, Broughton, etc, as these terms may be searched when a prospective customer tries to find a service provider that covers a specific area of town.
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Include location information in your social media channels.
Turn on location reporting on services like Twitter and Facebook, especially when you’re posting from a mobile device. Once you’ve set a physical location for your business on your Facebook Page, you (and anyone who comes to visit) then check-in to report a visit, notifying friends via your newsfeed.
Alternatively, take a look at services like Foursquare or Gowalla for similar location based functionality.
Photos taken using a smartphone are often automatically geotagged with the longditude and latitude details of the camera at the time of shooting. These are embedded in the metadata of the image (invisible to human readers, visible to search engines) – so don’t be shy about posting plenty of photos both on your blog and across the social web, they can genuinely be beneficial to your local search campaign.
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Network, Network, Network…
There is no replacement for traditional networking and referral based marketing. This was true a hundred years ago and is still true today, we just have many more ways to talk and refer.
Make friends, talk to other business owners and get out there. Nothing you do as a small business owner or marketer will be more beneficial than this. However, don’t treat everyone as a potential customer – they could be far more valuable than that! Instead of directly trying to sell your services through networking, find ways in which you can help others by promoting their business, giving them referrals, writing about an event they’re running or a review of their service. You will often find that a random gesture of goodwill is repaid many times further down the line, and those with existing businesses, a blog or local website can be good friends to have on-side for the future.
Write reviews or mentions about local businesses and help them push what they need to push in exchange for good karma – you’ll build local friends who’ll help you get your content out there to their local audience too, probably when you need it most.
Thanks for reading! Are you ready to go local yet?
So that’s it for our look at online marketing in Milton Keynes today! I really hope you got some inspiration or at least a few tips toward making the most out of local online marketing in our region.
Do you have a small to medium sized business in the local area that you’re promoting online? Do you have a success story that you’d like to share with us, or a question that we might be able to help with? We’d love to hear from you! Either leave us a comment below or get in touch by email, phone or pop in for a tea!
