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Went Hot: March 24, 2008 - 3:03 pm
Posted By: nowsourcing 289 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.timnash.co.uk)
Category: Local & Maps
11 Comments
Went Hot: March 24, 2008 - 3:03 pm
Posted By: nowsourcing 289 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.timnash.co.uk)
Category: Local & Maps
11 Comments
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Comments
Very well put together, and thanks for including me :)
Great post
Having sold professional services into a local market for decades, advertised my company's resources, and been married to a board member of the local advertising agency community, I believe that if you want local seo clients, one should target and market to the largest potential clients in the region. One should target those clients. I'd look for the ones spending the most in local print, IYP, local radio and tv.
They already have the money to afford top notch seo services.
When one leaves it to the responses of local availability one typically gets the smallest clients.
Dave
The study wasn't really about the type of client in the local area though its an interesting idea to compare smaller mom and pop companies with medium to large businesses and if locality makes a difference to them.
The study was simply many SEO firms certainly here in the UK are regionally targetting but I wanted to know if there was any point to it!
In my experience, SEO firms need strong trust factors. That may not include being local, as very often companies don't view their local prospects to be as good as prospects from major cities or hubs of industry.
If you are an SEO firm in Seattle (a.k.a. John Andrews ;-), you have a lot of such trust working for you. Even major Seattle Companies will want you (despite your being local). But a major Seattle tech company is not as likely to hire an SEO firm in Oklahoma, unless they have adequate other trust factors working for them.
This artilce struck a cord with me. We focus on local business almost exclusively and have found great success. We have clients that are willing to pay what it costs, have faith and prefer to work with a local development/SEO firm. We also get quite a few national clients, but the majority of work we do is local. We compete with the best on a national level in every industry we go after. We're not from Silicon Valley, Seattle, Chicago or New York. You'll find us in a small, upscale town called Zionsville, Indiana, just outside of Indianapolis. We've found that once you've made your clients successful that the word spreads like wild fire. Our sales reps go to local chamber and networking events to get our name out and we focus on keywords/phrases that our CLIENTS are searching for, not what our COMPETITORS are searching for. All I can say is, be careful with your keyword research. Suffice it to say that I could care less how well we rank for 'indianapolis search engine optimization'.
Good read. I learned the importance of targeting SEO clients.
One thing that I never understood is why some people insist on hiring some SEO with limited skills in their area over a high skilled one asking for the same money just because that guy lives "too far".
At all risk of reducing your long work into a mere sentence (please take no offence), it's not about ranking for traffic here people, it's really about ranking so that you look good. Can't be the top dog if you dont even rank for your own service. It's just up to you if you can afford the hours to achieve rankings. Thats how I see it anyway.
And SEO is rather a complicated example, because the trust factor will depend on the situation, obviously same-country SEO is pretty necessary, because web behaviour is different etc etc. It's simple, if a company manages to find your SEO page or ad, and is convinced they need SEO, they will use you depending on how good your response is to their initial marketing need. Ranking for any relevant terms is important here.
An example like "Sam's corner clothing store" illustrates what type of business needs local SEO, while "Pete's free e-books" perhaps illustrates who might not.
No offense taken, the more people have been discussing the more I think perhaps I should have spent more time discussing the benefits and justifications behind looking to your local community and not just looking at if such targetting has been successful.
I started the process in many respects the wrong way round, by looking at who was targetting local communities and rather then asking the question why asked did it work. Of course the answer is not black and white.
Tim:
congrats on an interesting article with a lot of comments on your blog post and here. Its an interesting topic. My focus is more related to the approach taken by sling shot.
Should one decide to optimize an seo business for a local market, using slingshot's approach affords better results.
Dave