Marketplace

Most businesses have jumped on the train of internet marketing as they have discovered the value of cheap, targeted advertising compared to more traditional mediums. Not only that, but it offers many companies a much wider customer base than they could previously access.

Just think about it, as little as a decade ago if you wanted to sell something in another city or country you would have to open a point of sale locally, which was certainly not cheap. Most businesses couldn’t dream of expanding abroad due to costs, however the internet opened the doors to small businesses as well, allowing them to compete with the big fish.

However, web wide advertising is not always suited to every type of business, especially some types of offline service providers. For example, a restaurant will never be able to service more than the local area and therefore it doesn’t make sense for its website to target the whole web. This is where local internet marketing comes in.

In this case, the SEO plan is designed to target only people interested in the local area. This can be done with the use of geographically targeted keywords, maps and many more.

The advantage of focusing on local internet marketing is that costs are usually much lower than if you were to target the general public. For example, “French restaurant Houston” will not cost as much per click as “French restaurant” and will only target people interested in a French restaurant which is in Houston. On the other hand, a search for “French restaurant” will bring up a very long list of French restaurants all over the world.

Local internet marketing is an excellent option for offline, small businesses that provide local services and their type of business does not allow them to expand globally. Plumbing, landscaping and even cleaning services are all such businesses. On the other hand, web development companies or ebook publishers do not have the same limitations and in their case they should focus on global internet marketing.

One extremely useful way to take advantage of local internet marketing is with maps. The large search engines offer a map service where companies can register their offline address. This has multiple advantages but the main one is that it establishes credibility because people can see the physical location of your business. This also has a positive impact on the ranking of your website but, unfortunately, it is a technique that is often overlooked.

Local internet marketing is an excellent way to reach extremely targeted customers for a much lower cost than if you were to market to the entire world wide web. However, you need to do a little more investigation regarding which keywords your PPC campaign should target and maybe even get some professional internet marketing consulting to show you how you can design and track your campaigns.

The beauty of internet marketing is that you can see virtually in real time how effective your campaigns are and tweak them accordingly. However, you do need some professional advice until you learn the ropes and can handle it yourself.