Leveraging Local Search to Market Your Small Business: Part I

An Introduction to Local Search

The use of major search engines to find businesses and services within a geographic area is one of the fastest growing segments of search.
The overall goal of local search is to make it easy for local consumers to find your small business.  Consider the case of a consumer using a search engine to find pizza in Port Jefferson, NY.  If a consumer uses the search query “pizza port jefferson, ny,” Google will provide that individual with a list and map of matching businesses.

Social Media Improves Search Engine Optimization

Social media sites, such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, can be a great way to generate exposure for your content.  We’ve written previously about how these sites can create super-spikes of traffic to your content.  However, a recent analysis by BestRank.com shows an added benefit of the use of social media - improved search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO) includes many elements, one of which is back-links, or links on other sites that point to your own.  Search engines place a lot of weight on back-links as they serve as a demonstration of your content’s value: if everyone is linking to it, it must be important information.   The good people at BestRank ran a test to demonstrate how social media can drive back-links.  One of their pieces of content was heavily promoted by the Reddit community, which increased the content’s visibility and resulted in coverage by (and thus links from) Wired.com and Popurls.com, among others.

The increased number of back-links to the author’s content, particularly from high volume sites like Wired.com, catapulted the article to the top of the major search engines for relevant keywords.  Even today, two months after the article was produced, it still retains the top spot at Google.  As illustrated in the following graphic, this has resulted in a high and sustained level of traffic for that one piece of content:

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