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There Is Success in Local SEO Marketing

In most situations, it is more practical and advantageous for small businesses to focus their marketing campaign locally. It makes perfect sense, because in doing so, you are catering to a more targeted traffic source. Here are some tips in conducting local SEO marketing.

Keywords
Before you commence on your local marketing, it is very important that you do a comprehensive research on the most effective keywords that you can use for your site. What is appealing about finding local search terms is that there is lesser competition. A knowledgeable businessman can land a top rank with a “location” plus “general contractor” key phrase, than a businessman who uses “general contractor” alone. It would be very difficult to bring the latter to a top rank in search engines.

Directory Listings
One clear-cut method of getting your business recognized is to have it listed in the most famous directories. Yahoo Local and Google Places are two examples of great places to have your business listed. There is an increasing number of people who automatically make use of these directories every time they search for local products and services in their area.

Consider Smaller Search Engines As Well
It is unwise to concentrate only in one major search engine, like Google. With local searches, it can certainly benefit you to consider other search engines as well. You may perhaps get a local listing with Bing Maps. It may only hold a lesser percentage of traffic than Google, but it can still be substantial. Remember that you can benefit from whatever traffic that comes your way.

Register Your Domain Name
Make sure that the information on your domain name matches with the registered business name and the address. Registering your domain name correctly, can actually improve your ranking in both local and major search engine results.

Overall, it is more effective to focus your marketing strategies on the local market. By doing so, you will see a significant difference in your site visitors. The results of your SEO marketing campaign can come much quicker. This is because you are focusing your advertising on your main target audience.

Why The Best Performance Based SEO Companies Don’t Always Charge the Big Bucks

Search engine optimization is a hard thing to measure. You don’t ever really know how much of it happened naturally because you’re awesome or how much was the SEO company doing their thing. But an SEO company that has lots of clients and consistently manages to get them all ranked on the SERPs has what they call ‘performance-based value’. In other words, you can’t assume that they got lucky and every one of their clients was a winner — at some point, after so many dozens of clients, you have to admit that they’re either freakishly lucky or that they know their stuff.

That’s precisely why so many people are looking for the best performance-based SEO companies — because without performance-based value, you don’t actually know if a given SEO company is skilled or just going by rote and occasionally getting lucky enough to earn a testimonial from a client who did half of the heavy lifting themselves.

The surprising part to many people is that by the performance-based value metric, some SEO companies that charge huge amounts of money get piss-poor ratings, while other companies that charge very meager amounts end up providing HUGE value per dollar. Why does this happen? There are many reasons, but a big part of it is the opacity of the SEO market.

When you don’t actually have good ways to measure the value of a service, you don’t really have a good way to know how much money they make you. Which means that what really determines the prices that an SEO company can charge is what kind of clients they can attract. When you’re writing SEO content for Travelocity.com, you’re going to end up making more money than if you’re writing SEO content for Ken Leatherman of the Warrior Forum, plain and simple. It may be that you’re actually providing better SEO value per dollar to Mr. Leatherman — but value per dollar isn’t as important in the SEO world as how well you do your SEO marketing.

This isn’t to say that paying more for SEO is necessarily a bad idea — only that doing your research and hiring a performance-valued SEO company is.

SEO & Marketing: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

It used to be, a year or so ago, that SEO and Marketing were, to coin a phrase, the same side of two different coins. You used each one for the same basic purpose — to get people to buy things from you — but they rarely interacted. Today, however, with Panda and Penguin having thrown “normal” SEO under the bus, almost all truly good SEO is marketing — specifically, Content Marketing.

In other words, the best search engine optimization companies around offer marketing as an SEO service.

Every advertisement you create is, in the eyes of an SEO company, a piece of content. And every piece of content you create can, in the eyes of a marketing company, act as advertising. Panda and Penguin obliterated a vast swath of non-content-oriented SEO practices, and among the leaders in content-based SEO, Content Marketing is the obvious choice.

Seriously, the other option (having someone create content that is used strictly for backlinks without any consideration to whether or not people actually want to read) is insanity. If you’re going to put the time and effort into having content created in the first place, why would you pay $.01/word to someone who burly speak English and get just the backlinks when you could double that, pay for a native English writer, and get content that will motivate people to buy in addition to the backlink?

Yes, SEO and marketing today are in fact largely one and the same. Well, there are clearly still lots of offline marketing firms who know nothing of SEO, but trying to find a high-quality SEO company that doesn’t also have a few marketing experts on staff is becoming an increasingly unlikely task.

In the eyes of the consumer, this should be considered a good change, for one simple reason: great content never gets Google slapped by some minor algorithm change. It never gets sandboxed. It will never become ‘grey hat’. Great content is the ultimate evergreen resource; chase it or eventually, whatever else you’re