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If you have a general non-local oriented site (like ours called www.tradeshow-display-experts.com) go ahead and create a completely new site to reach
local market. It could consist of only one or two pages with links to your main site. (www.popups-toronto.com, www.popups-canada.com, www.vinyl-banners-usa.com, www.seattle-pizza.com). The good news is that generally these names are still available — so get them while you can!
A name like this should be searchable (so it is findable using Search Engines), but even more important it must be memorable for people in local market you are trying to reach, so you can make it basis for your local promotion efforts.
Now that you have a Location-Focused Identity (LFI) you can start to promote it locally. Here are some fairly obvious strategies:
Do everything you can to develop your LFI into a "brand" with your customers, contacts, and prospects. Let's say it is "seattle-pizza.com". Plaster this on all your promotions. You want customers and prospects to remember your site name, and to find it without having to search for it.
Register your new site with locally-oriented and industry-specific directories or link exchanges that are likely to send traffic your way. The point of these links is different from link exchanges where you want to get higher SE ranking. These links are for generating traffic.
Create informal alliances with other locally-oriented, non-competitive businesses in your industry. The two best sources for such alliances are first, your customer list, and second, your supplier list. What form could these alliances take? Here are some suggestions: Joint sponsorship of online (or offline) contests, joint sponsorship of golf tournaments, joint participation in local trade shows.
Offer sponsorships or special discounts for products or services to high visibility local organizations such as Chamber of Commerce, service clubs, community sports associations — where you are likely to get exposure for your locally-oriented services. Be sure to insist that your LFI is prominently (and tactfully) displayed.
Local offline advertising. Generally I do NOT recommend promoting your online identity with (relatively expensive and inefficient) offline advertising. But using local advertising to promote your
LFI may be an exception. It will generally depend on your product. The best scenario is to create offline advertising that does "double-duty" — that has immediate promotional value (and immediate returns), but also helps build your "brand". A good example might be Indian restaurant that uses direct mail to generate local business lunch traffic. This same clientele (local business people) will be prime prospects for online strategies: establish your brand and they will almost effortlessly find you online.
Locally-oriented online advertising. This is inherently inefficient because of broad-brush reach of online advertising. But some techniques such as Google adwords allow you to target specific keywords (e.g., "Indian food Denver"). I suspect, however, if you structure your pages properly, you will find it fairly easy to get good position in regular Google search rankings for such terms, making it unnecessary to "buy" position with ads.
Conclusion This last point (about relative ease of getting good SE ranking with local keywords) is one of most exciting aspects of quest to reach local markets. If you define your pages correctly, you should very quickly be able to score well on searches like "Indian Food Denver" or "Sod Hamilton"...because there are relatively few businesses catering to these terms. As web surfers become more local-services savvy, number of businesses will also increase. But number of Indian Food restaurants in Denver is unlikely to ever reach point where you won't score well on a local search. So you can see how this opens up fantastic opportunities for even moderately persistent online marketers interested in reaching local markets.
These suggestions just begin to scratch surface of possible ways to promote your Location- Focused Identity (LFI). The most important thing is to CREATE ONE.
Once you have created a memorable LFI, ways of promoting it will tend to fall into your lap.
Richard J. Hendershot, www.small-business-online.com This article is called "Online Business and Local Markets, Part 3: Strategies for reaching local markets"
Rick Hendershot has spent many years in Advertising and Marketing, and currently focuses his attention on website development. He is especially interested in using the web to promote local businesses.
