Targeting LA Neighborhoods via SEO for Leads, Revenue and ROI

Over the last few years, one of the biggest trends in online marketing has been local. Instead of aiming for short tail keywords, businesses have focused on smaller areas, targeting their city for keywords related to products they sell and services they offer.

This is a great strategy for small cities and towns, where prospective customers are more likely to search for city-related geographical keywords than specific neighborhoods.

In big cities like Los Angeles, one of the most effective ways to generate leads, sales and ROI from SEO is to go hyper-local. This level of targeting involves breaking your SEO efforts down into specific neighborhoods and suburbs, instead of city-wide terms.

We’ve implemented hyper-local SEO for many of our clients, always with positive results that, in the majority of cases, exceed those achievable with traditional SEO.

Here are a few reasons why we’re big fans of targeting neighborhoods and hyper-local areas for SEO:

• It’s less competitive. Most businesses don’t optimize for their local area, instead opting to compete for “big” local keywords. Since there’s less competition, you can get closer to the top of the search engine results pages and drive more traffic to your website.
• It’s faster. Since there’s less competition for hyper-local search keywords than for local keywords, you can build and promote pages that rank within a few months, instead of a few years.
• It’s better. Since hyper-local marketing is focused entirely on your immediate area (or the areas your business serves), it tends to generate more specific, focused leads that convert into customers at a higher rate than leads from regular local SEO.
• It’s cheap. Because competition is lower, there’s much less of a need to promote your content and spend your budget on traditional outreach and link building campaigns for hyper-local search.
• It’s much more targeted. In big cities like Los Angeles, city-wide targeting often results in leads that are outside your service area. With hyper-local SEO, you have more control over the areas in which you market your business.
• It’s easy to scale. Once you reach the number one spot for a short tail local keyword, it becomes hard to scale. WIth hyper-local SEO, you can quickly and easily scale to other neighborhoods, districts and suburbs to expand your reach.

One of the biggest advantages of targeting specific neighborhoods is that it’s extremely easy to implement. For most businesses, all that’s needed to reach the front page for hyper-local search keywords is a short, helpful page that covers the specific topic.

Since competition for hyper-local keywords is so much less intense than for local keywords, you can often rank purely on the strength of your website as a whole, with little or no link building or outreach required.

How to identify hyper-local search opportunities?

If you run a service business that operates in a specific area, one of the easiest ways to start a hyper-local SEO campaign is to break the area down into suburbs and sections.

For example, if your business is located in West Los Angeles, you can divide it into sub-cities such as Culver City, Santa Monica and West Hollywood. You can even break it down to target specific neighborhoods, such as Playa del Rey and Venice.

One way to target specific areas is by using ZIP codes. You’d be surprised to learn how many people search for local businesses by adding their ZIP code to a keyword, and how effective a quick mention of a specific ZIP code in your page title can be.

The more specific your targeting is, the smaller your potential audience becomes. However, as your keywords get more and more local, you’ll also find it easier to outrank your competitors for the top spots.

Can your business benefit from hyper-local SEO?

In big cities, hyper-local SEO is a valuable, underutilized source of leads and revenue. Our Los Angeles SEO company specializes in finding and capitalizing on local search opportunities that can help your business drive traffic, leads and sales.