If you are a local business and you want to optimize your website and attract local traffic, add a blog to your website. Used correctly, this is a powerful SEO tool. It does take willingness on your part to write for your blog. But if you are a cash strapped local business, then this can be an economical and very effective solution.
This is what you have to do.
Identify the broad keywords that you want to be found for such as plumber, florist, etc. Combine these broader phrases with your local city name such as Denver or Portland. So for florist in Denver, you would end up with Denver florist and florist Denver. You would also include florist in Denver. People do search using “in” fairly often.
Optimize your website using your keywords in the Title tag, the page headlines (H1) and in the visible text. This will make the blogging you do highly effective.
Add a blog as part of your website. I suggest adding a WordPress blog because it is easy to do. Don’t use the wordpress.com blog, instead install the blog on your website (WordPress.org). Many hosting providers allow you to deploy a WP blog with a “push button” deployment. Add plugins for SEO, Google Analytics and Feedburner and now you have a powerful SEO blog.
The SEO blogging technique doesn’t take long blog posts, but it does take a minimum of 3X per week. I have great results with postings at 125 words. The most important part is the structure of the SEO blog posting.
Each posting should be focused on only one keyword phrase. In our example above let’s say we wanted to optimize for Denver florist. You would want to use the keyword phrase in the Title of the blog posting and 2-3 times in the body of the posting.
You could select a Title such as “Denver Florist Braces for Fourth of July Crowds” or some attention getting headline that uses the keyword phrase. Take one of the instances you use the keyword phrase and link that phrase to a relevant page on your website that also uses that phrase.
Sounds simple, but does it work?
I have some friends that own a Vancouver, WA sod farm. Their website had no traffic and could not be easily found on Google. We used this method and blogged every day, seven days a week. After just two weeks, they not only were on page 1 of Google, for one phrase they actually had 8 out of 10 of the search results on that page 1 of the SERPs. Most of the listings were for the blog postings.