
Written by: Richard Fong
Published on March 16, 2017
Published on March 16, 2017
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:
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.
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.
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.