December 7, 2007      (Updated from our Nov. 19, 2003 article)

Having a site globally optimized for certain keywords is great, if you happen to have a business that sells its products or services all over the planet. But what if your industry is a local one, or if the products you sell only cater to a specific city or county?

Does it make sense to be in competition with hundreds or even thousands of other companies like yours when dealing for a local, smaller market?

In the same way that the good ‘old Yellow Pages have helped local and small businesses thrive before the advent of the Internet, today, a properly positioned website for a specific city or local market can do the same, even better and faster!

Having your site optimized for your local market can bring you a lot of sales, not to mention the repeat business spread over many years. In this article, I will show you how to concentrate your SEO efforts to just one specific geographic location or city.

Your "Geo-Title" tags
Can you think of a better place to start than on your title tags! If your title tag for an important products page is “black widgets” and you only sell those black widgets in the city of Toronto, by naming that title tag “Black Widgets for Toronto” or “Toronto Black Widgets”, just that simple step alone would drive a lot more sales to your site, providing people would type “Toronto”, either before or after the keywords “Black Widgets”.

If you are living in San Francisco and you only want to sell those black widgets in that city, you would name them: “San Francisco Black Widgets” and so on and so forth.

Going a step further, if you are only interested in a specific district, you should name that district as part of your title tag. A good example would be: “North Miami Black Widgets”. You wouldn’t rank as highly if people would type only “Miami Black Widgets” in Google, but you would probably beat most of your outside competitors if they would type: “North Miami Black Widgets”, as your title tag would appear mostly at the top of the results page in Google, or just about any other major search engine for that matter.

The whole idea here is relevancy, and North Miami is more relevant than just Miami, for a person living in North Miami.

Your "Geo-Headline" or descriptive header text
If you are optimizing your site for your local market, placing a “Geo-Headline” in bold H1 or H2 tags will also help you a great deal. If your market is strictly the city of Calgary, you could write a Geo-Headline that would look something like this:

"City of Calgary Black Widgets" or "Black Widgets made for Calgary". Either one of these would drive a lot of targeted traffic to your site, since they are Geographically (Geo) specific.

Today more than ever, the major search engines are using complex algorithms and sophisticated ranking formulas that take geo-physical location under consideration, further increasing your chances of a better ranking for a specific local market.

Your body text and "Geo-Sales" copy
The same principles need to be applied to the body of your text for maximum local visibility in the search engines. If your local market is the city of Edmonton Alberta, instead of writing: “Visit our green widgets page and check our great prices”, you could write: “Our green widgets have been formulated to withstand Edmonton’s harshest winters and are Albertan’s first choice when it comes to after-sale service and warranty”.

Such strong Geo-Location copywriting is certain to get your site ranked well in the search engines. If you noticed carefully, I have included Edmonton and Alberta as two separate but very relevant geo-physical locations, as probably many searchers would type in the search box.

Use my "Geo-Linking" strategy to the fullest
If you really want to go all the way with my “Geo-Thinking” that I spoke about so far, then consider using my Geo-Linking strategy! What is Geo-Linking? My Geo-Linking strategy is to use the name of your city or local market in the text link from one page of your site to another. Here are a few examples:

1- Please click here to view our New York City Red Widgets
2- Click here to examine our Washington apartments
3- Compare our low prices on our Quebec City rental cars
4- Take a virtual tour of our Madison County City Hall
5- Read Denver-West’s real estate history since 1940

Conclusion
Optimizing a website for a local market or just a single city can be as simple and as straightforward as this. These are the basics and if you stick to them, you should do great. Always try to put yourself in the “shoes” of your average searcher.

If you are selling real-estate in just the eastern tip of a large city, use the many examples I gave you in this article and, in less time than it takes to have a Yellow Pages ad approved, printed and distributed in your city, your website should start generating targeted and strong local sales from many of your local prospects, searching for YOUR local products or services.

Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2003

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