I promised to post an article with details on how to transform your existing website from a vanilla, universal website into a local website that generates traffic from customers who are ready to buy from you right now.
To show you how to do this with your own site, I have taken a website called www.tenniswithtom.com, a local website owned by Tom who offers tennis lessons to young people. Tom wants his website to generate more local customers for his tennis lesson business. He asked for my advice on transforming his existing site into a locally friendly website that gets local customers to call him. Here are my suggestions. You can use these suggestions as a model for your own website. Enjoy and Prosper.
Transforming Your Website into Being Locally Friendly
To make a website more local search market friendly, you must address two audiences. First, you need to make it more search engine friendly—give search engines what they need for their searches. Second, you need to make the website more customer friendly—give the customers what they want to see on a website to help with their buying decisions.
1. Making Your Website Search Engine Friendly for Local Search Marketing
Keywords–Let’s look first at ways to make Tennis with Tom.com more search engine friendly. When I did a search to see what keywords Tom uses on his website, (http://www.seomastering.com/keyword-density-analyzer.php) this is what I found:
You can see from this report, “tennis” is the only word that has any frequencies. Without the use of keywords phrases relevant to Tom’s business, no one will ever find his website.
Next, I used Google’s free keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. I wanted to find which keywords are best suited for Tom’s tennis business.
Tags–Search engines look for title tags, meta tags/descriptions and H1 and H2 headings for keywords. Here is what Tom’s website currently has in these key areas: <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″> <title>Private and Small Group Lessons</title>. None of his tags contains any keywords!
Without references in these areas to keywords like “tennis lessons in St. Paul, Minnesota” or “kids tennis lessons”, no one will ever find Tom’s website to know he exists locally. Keyword phrases should become part of his Title tags.
For a meta tag or description, Tom might want to try the following: “Best tennis lessons in St. Paul, Minnesota for kids. Learn more about kids tennis lessons for beginners, intermediate and advanced tennis instructions.” In this short meta description, he has three of the top keyword phrases.
2. Making Tom’s Website Customer Friendly to Local Search Marketing
Add Addresses to Each Page–There are ways to make Tom’s website more conducive to customers searching for local tennis lessons. Since search engines index pages and not websites, Tom can start by adding his local address and telephone number to each of his web pages. This will provide visual validation of his local address as well give search engines further proof about his local business.
Domain Names–“Tennis with Tom” as a domain name is not descriptive of his tennis business. He could investigate getting a domain like “Tennis lessons in stpaul.com”, or “tennis classes in stpaul.com or other domain variations that contain keywords in the domain itself. These domain titles will tell a visitor more about his business. It will also give the search engines another reason to select his site when someone types in tennis lessons in St. Paul. Additional domains cost $10.00 per year and can be pointed to his existing website.
Google Map—Putting a Google map on his website will give a visual effective to customers visiting Tom’s site as well as a digital reference to search engines to reinforce Tom’s local presence in the St. Paul area. Here’s the reference he can use to embed a map into his current website: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/
Local Article–I suggest Tom create an article on a new webpage with information about local tennis history, local tennis events, local tennis celebrities. People will read local tennis articles and it will also allow search engines additional reasons to choose his site when people type in “tennis lessons in St. Paul”.
Videos–Attracting interest is a critical part of marketing. Sports are great video material. Tom could put videos on his site showing tennis tips or showing a class of young people learning tennis. These would not be difficult videos to create. He could put them on YouTube, with title tags and descriptions that match his new website tags and titles. YouTube also allows for a geographic indicator on its site. Using the same keywords as the title really strengthens the overall page and makes it extremely easy to get on the 1st page on Google.
Craig’s List–Put his site on local Craig’s list as well as local Chamber of Commerce. Both of these local references will validate his local claims for people and search engines.
Local Areas Served–Tom could also put on his website a page that describes the various local areas he serves with his youth tennis programs. Since he wants to expand his business, he may include some additional areas where he does not currently serve people. Most people want lessons from a person close to their area. There are a variety of suburbs of St. Paul that would be fertile ground for Tom’s tennis lessons. Putting local content names on Tom’s website will bring more search engine attention.
Links from Local Businesses–Find friends in related businesses, such as sport shops, shoe stores (tennis shoes) to provide links to Tom’s website. Let these be anchor links such as Tennis with Tom is the best tennis lessons in the city with the local reference to emphasize his local presence. People love these links as well as search engines.
Testimonials--Tom needs some local testimonials on his website. Since he deals with younger people, he should have testimonials from both the children as well as their parents about the value they found in Tom’s lessons. These testimonials should include name of local city added to their testimonial, giving credibility to the best tennis lessons in St. Paul. Search engines also love these local testimonials.
Conclusion
Tom’s current website is no different than most websites developed by small business owners. They were originally designed with the dream of getting customers from the world-wide web. The dream has changed. It is now much more profitable to redo a website to make it local search market friendly.
Remember, two of every five searches is for a local product or service. It only takes a few tweaks and adding local references to transform an existing website into an effective local marketing tool. Then you can start to see your share of the 20% local customer searches. Invest a couple of hours of your time to transform your own site into a local search marketing site.
Use the Leave a Reply section below to share your thoughts about transforming your current website into a local marketing machine.
