A few months ago, I launched a new website for my company, and in that time I’ve been focusing on targeting local search terms in my small area - mainly “Cityname Web Design” or “Cityname Provice Web Design” and variations on that. My main domain has a lot of trust in the search engines already, and I’ve been building some good organic links and I’ve had a lot of success.
Currently, I have almost 60 page one rankings and that number is going up all the time. These rankings were relatively easy to go after, and while they don’t send more than what could be called a trickle of traffic (by conventional standards) the results have been pretty amazing.
The main benefit of this traffic is that it’s highly specialized, and usually comes from people who are looking for exactly what I’m selling. So while the amount of traffic is low, the conversion rate is extremely high. I’m getting at least 5 prospects a month from local searchers, and sometimes 2 or 3 in a single week.
I’m currently in the process of making this into a marketable product for my customers, but I’ve found the biggest hurdle is to sell the value of the package. Clients have trouble wrapping their head around the concept… but it’s really just math. Any company like mine whose base price for products / services starts at around $2000, you don’t need to make too many sales to make the investment in the search engine marketing worthwhile.
To be completely honest, like any SEOer, I’ve developed a few tricks of my own to find quality links… and unfortunately we usually keep those secrets close to our vest, but hey, at least I’m not promising to teach you how to make $100,000 a month for only $49.99 [this will make more sense when you read Jay’s next post :) ].
At the end of the day, these local terms are still much much less competitive than top level terms, and can bring in real business value - so don’t discount local search terms.
Good Profits.
