At its most basic level, local search engine marketing works much the same way as any other form of search engine marketing. You optimise your site for the search terms you’re trying to get website visitors for and you promote your site with the aim of getting backlinks pointing to it.

The difference is that there’s usually (but not always) less competition with local search engine marketing.

Ideas for local search engine marketing

As always with search engine optimisation, do your keyword research first. This means working out what real people are searching for in real life. Not what other people in your industry are searching for – they’ll almost certainly use industry specific jargon that real humans won’t have a clue about.

There are a number of places you can do keyword research for your local search engine marketing. Start with the log fies for your own site – most website hosts will give you access to these in a fairly friendly “wrapper” such as AWStats or Webalizer. You’ll be able to dig through these stats and see what search terms are currently being used to find your website. Google Analytics will do a similar job, so choose the option you’re most comfortable with.

Then put one of your more popular keyword phrases into Google. Towards the left of the screen are a pile of links you’ve probably ignored. One of these may say “Wonder Wheel” or it may say something like “more search tools”. Either way, dig around until you get to the Wonder Wheel.

This will show you related phrases that Google thinks are relevant to your initial keyword. It’s only a computer program, so it’s not always right, but often you’ll get a number of other potential keywords that are related to your local search engine marketing. Write a blog article on any that take your fancy.

Posting new content on your site on a reasonably regular basis may be almost all you need to rank well in local search engine marketing.

Unless you’re in a market where suppliers don’t actually need to be located in your town, in which case you’re probably going to be up against some stiffer competition.

If that’s the case, you’ll need to get some decent quality inbound links pointing to your website to round off your local search engine marketing.

Directories are a good place to start doing this: sites like HotFrog (weird name), Yelp, Touch Local and lots of others will give you a free link back to your website. Often in the hope of selling you more services.

Make it a habit to add some fresh content to your website on a regular basis and to seek out some backlinks as well and you’ll be well on your way to beating your local competitors and dominating local search engine marketing for your town.