The Importance of Local SEO for Small Business
by Brian Marine - January, 2010

As small businesses (SMBs) continue to struggle with difficult economic conditions, they also continue to look for new ways to drive traffic to their web sites and businesses. Recently, as Google focuses it's considerable power behind their Local Business Center and Google Maps, one new niche in the online marketing industry has become local search engine optimization (LSEO).


A proper LSEO strategy can help SMBs leverage the power of Google and the many other local search engines and business directories to increase the amount of traffic to a web site, and at a much lower cost than traditional SEO or pay-per-click marketing. It can also take advantage of the burgeoning mobile market which should continue to grow throughout 2010 and become increasingly more important to SMBs online marketing strategies.

While it is free, and fairly simple, to add a business listing to the Google LBC, many small business owners are not doing this correctly and therefore not taking full advantage of what these listings have to offer. They also often make the mistake of thinking that because Google gets the largest share of web searches that it is not necessary to utilize the other local SEs and directories.

Marine Creative, in association with Netsmartz, the worlds largest SEO company, now offers a very cost effective LSEO service that provides a comprehensive local search strategy that includes utilizing the Microcard hCard format (for helping search engines provide “better crawlability” of your site), placing geo tags in the meta tags (which gives the page an extra push when someone searches for your business), and the proper setting of your geographic location in Google webmaster tools (which helps provide more targeted traffic. Contact Marine Creative for more information.