Businesses trying to get traffic from searches fall generally into two groups:
- Those whose customers could be anywhere in the U.S. or in the world.
- Businesses whose customers are primarily local.
These make for a very different job getting high search engine rankings. In the one case you are competing against every other business in the same category in the entire country or world.
In the other case, you are only competing against other businesses in your area. A much easier job, unless you are in an extreme niche business with not much competition.
Or, as in some cases, others in the business are still in the Twentieth Century and not taking any effective measures to market themselves online.
In any case, what makes a company’s potential customers local in nature are several:
- Delivery of the product or service requires physical presence at the customer’s location (carpet cleaning, limousine service).
- Business by its nature usually involves customer coming into your store or office or place of business (lawyers, sporting events).
- Business by its nature involves familiarity with things about your local area (TV and radio advertising).
- Customers prefer to deal with someone local. This applies to our marketing business. Even though we can conduct our business exclusively by phone, email, etc. And we do have many clients scattered around Florida and the U.S. and Canada.
Yet the majority of clientele are in Tampa Bay. Why? Many people feel more comfortable buying marketing services from someone nearby.
If your business is primarily local, you have to determine not only the search terms that are important, but what “geographical localizers” people use in searching. And then optimizing the site with those as well as the search terms.
This is not always obvious, research and testing are necessary. For example, in Tampa Bay, by far the most used localizer is “Tampa”. Not “Tampa Bay” and not the name of one’s own town, even if it is “St. Petersburg” or “Clearwater” (themselves good sized cities located across the Bay from Tampa itself).
Why? Because people living in any town in Tampa Bay, other than Tampa, are within at most 15 minutes drive of the next town over. So rather than search for one town, then another, then another, they search on “Tampa” then look for the ones closer to where they are which sound good. They’ve learned a search on “Tampa” will turn up businesses all across Tampa Bay. And because savvy marketers realized people were doing this, started working heavily on optimizing their sites for “Tampa” as well as “Tampa Bay” and the actual town in which the business was located.
We learned this first because of our research uncovering that people across many industries were searching disproportionately on “Tampa”. AFTER that we figured out why. And that then helped us figure out how to use word snippets and click ads to take advantage of people’s search patterns.
Thirteen05 Creative is one of Tampa’s leading local SEO companies. Having been in business since 1999, we have helped numerous companies in and around the Tampa Bay Area rank their websites for relevant keywords, driving targeted organic search traffic to their websites that has helped grow their companies. Contact us today to learn more about how our local Tampa SEO services can grow your Florida business.
