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More often than not, people want to ‘buy local’ if they can find local. Customers might want to support their local stores just to keep money in their community, support businesses that help out the local community, get their hands on a product immediately and sometimes people just don’t want to pay for shipping. But in order for potential customers to ‘buy local’ they first need to know about your business and that’s where a strongly branded local website can work wonders.

Below you’ll find seven strategies that ELEMENTS has implemented to bring local traffic to local websites with great success. This list is a basic primer of best practices for local online strategies that both small and medium sized businesses can use to jump start their own local campaigns.

Build Your Website

Obviously you need a website. What’s not obvious to first time business owners is how to build a website that users will want to come back to once they have found your site the first time.

Simple is Ok. There’s no reason to create a mega-site with more pages than you have content. Start with just a handful of pages that include important information about your business like hours, location, types of services or products and be sure to include a bit of personality in your pages to give a potential customer a glimpse of your company’s culture. Get a good designer to make a website that is easy to navigate, has good typography and exhibits optimal image placement as all of these are vital to keeping web surfers on your site once they have found it.

Optimize for Your City

Search engines like Google are putting greater emphasis on local results. That means if a surfer types in the word “haircut” the search engine determines the surfer’s geographic location and then displays a result of businesses relatively close to where that surfer currently is that give haircuts. Those local results are your target so let’s make sure the search engines know where your site is located.

There are two ways to best optimize your website for local results. The first is something a lot of people do without even thinking of the benefits, which is including your physical location on each and every page of your website. Another very valuable way to achieve good local search engine results is to include the name of your city actually in the domain itself (i.e. denvercomfortinn.com).

Get Listed

Getting your physical address added to online directories is a step many local businesses tend to skip because they are worried about it being difficult. It’s not that bad. To get your site listed in Google Places just go to http://google.com/local/add/ and click the word “add”. See that wasn’t that bad. Now go do the same exact thing to Yahoo! Local & Yellowpages.com. Now, your phone number and address will appear on their maps and business listings.

Add a Google Map

One of the main goals behind your local online strategy is to get customers to your store. So why not make it easy for them to do so by adding a Google map with directions on how to get to your location right on your website. Your website designer should be able to integrate this into your existing website and as it’s really not that difficult it shouldn’t take them very long.

Interact With Your Customers

Social media is the latest buzz in online marketing, but there’s a reason for that, it works. Interactive tools like Facebook and company blogs allow you to interact directly with your customers to provide customer service, expose your company’s culture and offer up incentives to bring customers back in. Having a slow business day? Use Twitter to tweet out some immediate incentives to drive customers back to your door immediately. Keeping up with customers does take some effort, but your business will be better for it because people like to buy from businesses they trust.

Watch Your Stats

Even if you aren’t running a local campaign, watching your traffic statistics is critically important. From your stats you will get information on how visitors are finding your website and what they are doing once they get there which will allow you to make data driven decisions about your website. Is there a specific native dialect near your location and are you using it effectively? What keywords & phrases are working and which ones need to be pruned? These are questions that only your traffic statistics answer.

Go Offline

This is probably the best advice anyone can give you about your online local business strategy, get out there and be part of the community. Mingle with customers, join service organizations or support a local athletic team. These kinds of efforts don’t go unnoticed. You will gain contacts who can offer referrals to your website, turn contacts into followers of your social media campaigns and when you receive recognition for being a good citizen your website’s domain name can sit right there below your physical address.

These tips will drive more local customers to your website which is good because people want to ‘buy local’ if they can find local.

It’s funny, sometimes I crack open the old blog editor to write a post about a topic and end up writing about something completely different.  That’s what happened today.  While I was researching the use of using permanent redirects I stumbled upon a recent interview with Matt Cutts who happens to be Google’s mouthpiece to the SEO world.  In that interview Matt Cutts says something pretty poignant which pretty much verified what had long been suspected, which was that 301 permanent redirects do not transfer all of their PR(Page Rank) to the new designated page or website.

“That’s a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural Page Rank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).”

Sometimes there is a need to move content from one area of your website to another or you might even need to change your whole domain when you receive a cease & desist order from an attorney.  I myself have even used 301 redirects on my own sites when I went from shtml pages with ssi calls in them to php pages. 

So now that we know that there is at least some loss of PR when using a 301 redirect should we just leave the old page where it is and create new pages in the right place?  Well that’s a thought, but lets look at another point Matt Cutts makes about 301 redirects in that interview.

“Typically, duplicate content is not the largest factor on how many pages will be crawled, but it can be a factor. My overall advice is that it helps enormously if you can fix the site architecture upfront, because then you don’t have to worry as much about duplicate content issues and all the corresponding things that come along with it. You can often use 301 Redirects for duplicate URLs to merge those together into one single URL.”

See this is why mothers should not let their babies grow up to be SEO guys.  If we absolutely need to move content we either end up losing some of our existing PR on a 301 redirect to the new content or we leave the old content in place and risk a duplicate content penalty which Matt Cutts confirms could be a factor in how many pages on our site gets crawled.

What I take away from that interview is that we should not have duplicate content on our pages and we should really 301 redirect pages with content that needs to be moved to their respective new pages at the cost of some of our PR.  I guess that means that we should have bullet proof plans for our website layout prior to launching anything, but as anyone who has been in the traffic generation business can tell you adaptating to new strategies is paramount to maintaining success.