Local Search Tactic # 3 – Steal Traffic

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Yes, this is one of the more cutthroat tactics, but the internet is still ‘the wild west’ and you need to leverage every opportunity possible to compete locally.  If you are optimizing your website, you probably have a few “GIANTS” in your category that always dominate the top of the search results.  They have been around forever and probably have huge advertising budgets.  Fortunately for you, the internet is quickly leveling the playing field for the “little guy” to compete. 

The local GIANT’s big advertising dollars allow them to place ads on many offline advertising mediums, such as television, radio and print to establish and promote their brand.  However, with the growing importance and convenience of the internet, the purpose of their offline advertising is simply to direct customers online where they can take action. 

Naturally this is going to produce searches where consumers are specifically searching for their business name.  So why not leverage their offline advertising budget and show up in their search results?  In local search this can be done relatively easily as  competition for these searches is non-existent.

What you can do is include variations of the competitor’s business name in the meta data or keywords for your site.  This will not appear on your website but the search engines will pick it up.  This will help optimize your site for searches of your competitors.  If you are right there when people search, those that want to compare services or “shop around” will visit your site and give you a shot at their business. 

Have you ever decided to do business with a company, but to ensure you were making the right choice you did some investigation?  You probably searched for the company name,  the company name + reviews, + scam or + news.  If you have optimized your site to include these keyword phrases, these types of consumers will find you and you will have the opportunity to capitalize on any doubts they have.  You can also leverage the fact that you are not a GIANT company, but a successful small company built on customer service and developing strong relationships with clients.

Some other tactics for finding keywords that will bring you more leads: 

• Include some common misspellings of your keywords.  You can get ideas here
• Put keywords in quotation marks and you will rank higher when people use quotation marks in their searches for your keywords
• Use the Google Adwords free keyword tool

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