Local Internet marketing

Although your website can reach the whole world, your local business might not serve outside your city or limited geographical area. Buy you should not mistakenly believe that Internet marketing won't work well for your local business. In industrialized nations, upwards of 75% of people have Internet access, therefore you can rest assured that a number of people surfing the web at any given moment within the area you serve. Here are a few local Internet marketing techniques that can be used to reach local people.

All of these techniques can be applied at a national level as well, but be aware that there are a few optimization techniques that you should be aware of for search engine marketing in Canada.

Search engine advertising targeting by location

Google adwords offers a number of location targeting options that allow you to limit your campaign to specific countries, languages, states / provinces and even cities as well. Bing offers similar options as well.

Search engine local business listings

You have surely noticed that certain search results that include a city display a map and a few company listings. There are a few optimization techniques that can help you place better, but ultimately it comes down to your promimity to the city centroid. Also, a basic requirement is that you get listed! Submit your company profile to Bing local listing center and Google places (previously called "local business center").

Long tail optimization

Certain keywords are very wide and have a number of variations tacked on to the end of them, trailing off into increasingly specific searches with lower number of searches. These are called "long tail keywords". Many of these of these keywords can be associated with a city name and still give you a small number of very targeted searches. These can be very lucrative for local businesses despite the relatively low number of searches.

Local twitter

Twitter has always seeked to be a tight knit community with a neighbourhood feel. It really tries to bring people together, and this can be especially interesting if they are in close proximity. Most people enter their city location so tools like twellowhood and nearby tweets offer great opportunities to find and follow local twitter users.