Local business promotion is most important as your customers are in physical reach of your products and services. It is more important that the customer in your city finds your services than a customer in another country who is able to find you but not able to reach you.

How local business promotion is different from Geo targeting

Note that GEO targeting and local business listing and promotions are different things. Let me explain how… GEO targeting is a technique that can be used to promote your content to geographies out of your physical reach ex. A tourism company in India targeting customers from US needs to target US geography for his site but he still operates his business and website from India. Local business promotion uses certain tactics to promote your products and services in the market you reside in physically ex. A florist promoting his delivery services in his local market, would have no use of a customer coming to his site from US or Europe where he can not make a conversion.

Following are some points to help yourself with promoting your business in you local territory.

1. Locate your self on a map :

Create a free listing for your local business on Google Maps Local Business Center and Yahoo! Local . That way your business can show up on a map when people do a local search.

2. Your local address on your WebPages:

Add the street address, zip code, phone number, and the five or 10 other local community place names your business serves. Zip codes are primarily important to portray where your businesses focus.

3. Add your location in the title tag of important pages:

Include you location in title tags of important pages like “contact form”, “about us”, “feedback” these pages do not have special content anyways and people tend to miss their titles, these can be important pages to tell the SEs about your geographical interests.

4. Add geo specific meta tags to your pages:

<meta name=”geo.position” content=”18.4897843737471; 73.85685682296753″/>

<meta name=”geo.country” content=”IN”/>

<meta name=”geo.region” content=”IN-MH”/>
These help the search engine get exact location of your business.

5. Add your business to local directories of your industrial domain:

Adding your listing on local directories provides you linkbacks from web directories hosted near your physical location. Hits coming from local IPs help.

6. Request link exchanges from local businesses:

Request links from local businesses with place names in the communities you serve and complementary businesses in your industry nationwide.

7. Strategize your ink building campaigns with a geographical limitation in mind:

While registering to forums, check the who is information on their domain. You might want to contribute to forums where local people post and discuss on products. Join communities of your city, state or locality with linkbacks to your business in your signatures. A press release with a local news group or a product review from a online magazine might work out wonders for you.

8. Submit Your Site to Trade Organization Sites and Specialized Directories:

There are lot many exhibitions, trade shows and local events happening. These people work a lot on  promoting their event details on net, why not associate with them to cash in on their promotion techniques. These links get promoted virally and stay long on the internet.

9. Include Your URL on office stationery, visiting cards, and product brochures:

This might sound like an offline promotion activity but trust me, there is no better way to promote than word of mouth. A direct traffic is always going to benefit more as the visitor comes looking directly for you with a purpose in mind.

10. Promote using traditional media:

Don’t discontinue print advertising that you’ve found effective. But be sure to include your URL in any display or classified ads you purchase in trade journals, newspapers, yellow pages, etc.

11. Spend some bucks in Ad campaigns:

The beauty of Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and others is the ability to target geographies. You can target the searches that generate from your localities and show your ads to them only. This is a very successful way of getting local conversions.

Tags- business promotion for local markets | local promotion |