Driving qualified traffic to your Website – that is local searchers who are actively searching for your product or service – depends greatly on how your small business ranks in the local search results. If your company is bricks and mortar and is located in Atlanta, Georgia, it does you no good to rank well in the search results in Eugene, Oregon.

Local SEO is the best way to drive qualified traffic to your small business, and a local small business SEO campaign driven by an SEO company is the best way to help you achieve maximum ROI. Consider these five local SEO tips that will help your small business dominate your local search engine listings.

Claim and Fill Out Your Google Places Listing

Google Places are business listings provided free of charge by Google. Claiming your small business' listing on Google Places is the first step, but doesn't mean you'll automatically be found by potential customers. One of the more important of our local SEO tips is for you to completely fill out your Google Places listing with your business' contact information, products and services, hours of operation and with supporting pictures of your products/services or portfolio of your work – and don't forget to choose the appropriate categories that your business falls into (i.e. Internet, marketing, etc.).

Consistently Post Your Information

The next one of our local SEO tips is to NOT be lazy! It is important to post all of your small business' data correctly and consistently on each business listing or directory that you join. Your information should include address, Website and phone number. Using consistent profile data on your business throughout the Internet makes you more relevant to the search engines and to potential customers.

If you want to boost your relevancy within your industry, it is important that you submit your Website and business information to as many business listings and search engines as you can. Consider creating profiles on Websites like Manta and LinkedIn. It is also useful to submit your website to niche directories and websites relevant to the theme of your Website.

Get Customer Reviews

If you do a good job, you should get credit for it! One of our great local SEO tips is for you to encourage your customers to post reviews on your local business listings or to offer testimonials that you can post on your Website. Pointing them to your Google Places, Yahoo or Bing business listings or your page on Yelp! to leave positive reviews not only improves your chances of landing a potential client who is reading your business listing, but also makes you more relevant to the search engines.

If you have less-than-desirable reviews on your listings, do not argue with customers over a bad review. Be friendly and professional if you decide to post in reply. Alternatively, you could hire a local marketing company to handle Online Reputation Management for your small business.

Have an Optimized Web Presence

Make sure your small business has a strong Web presence. Have a professional Web Design Company develop an attractive, user-friendly Website that features strong content and offers a full breadth of information on your products and services. The Website should be focused on conversions – have a prominent call to action and make it easy for site visitors to contact you.

Finally, the most important of our local SEO tips is to have your professional Web company develop a targeted local SEO campaign for your small business. Your local small business SEO campaign should focus on driving traffic from potential customers in your area. Your SEO Company will craft targeted keywords for your products or services that have geo-specific modifiers based on city, state and zip codes (i.e. gas station 30309).

These 5 local SEO tips can help drive more qualified traffic to your Website and help build your brand locally. For more information on Local SEO strategies, contact our Atlanta SEO Company.

In the Internet age where new businesses are popping up daily and competition is at an all-time high, businesses are trying to gain any advantage they have over their rivals. The most obvious place for businesses to target better brand visibility is online in the local search results. Getting the maximum amount of search engine traffic and being No. 1 in the local search results is the best way for businesses edge out the local competition.

How to increase search engine traffic to your business' Website isn't rocket science. The amount of information online that can be found on blogs about local SEO tactics and how to optimize a Website can be overwhelming. But the most critical aspect for business owners is to locate the right local SEO company to help guide them on how to increase search engine traffic to their Websites.

Local SEO campaigns are the best way how to increase search engine traffic from Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Local SEO focuses on geo-targeted areas that businesses are likely to gain customers from. Defining this target area and developing relevant, worthwhile content that will captivate the audience – and the search engines – is critically important to Local SEO and is how to increase search engine traffic.

This compelling content should be optimized for the search engines, using geo-targeted keyword phrases that relate to the business' products or services. For example, a residential roofing business located in Charlotte, North Carolina targeting local customers should focus its content on keywords surrounding Charlotte, such as: “charlotte roofing repair” , “residential roofers in charlotte nc”, or “roofers 28201” throughout the content and in the page title.

Using the appropriate amount of keyword phrases (keyword density) is also important for well optimized content and local SEO. The search engines are looking for keywords and variations of the keywords that users are searching for. Developing strong content that includes these keywords on the Web page can promote a jump in search engine rankings and in turn an increase in search engine traffic.

The last piece of the puzzle that will help us answer how to increase search engine traffic is to build relevant, quality links from high ranking Websites. Backlinks are the most influential catalyst in Local SEO campaigns. Getting these on-text backlinks from Websites with a PageRank of 4 or higher is optimal. These links will help the business' Website gain PageRank on their targeted keywords, and is a major contributing factor in how to increase search engine traffic to the site.

Creating a worthwhile press release and blasting it out to several PR mediums is a solid start for increasing brand visibility. Press releases can be powerful tools to help promote Local small business SEO campaigns – but only if they are properly optimized. Coupled with increased brand visibility, a well executed and well optimized press release can also generate something of potentially even greater value – higher search engine results for Local small business SEO.

Optimize Press Releases

In order to reap the profits of higher search engine rankings for local small business SEO, the following strategies should be used to optimize press releases.

1. Press release optimization can be compared to SEOing a page on a Website. Optimized press releases should include targeted keywords throughout the body text of the press release. Potential customers are searching for these targeted keywords, and by including them in your optimized press release, you're increasing your chances of your press release getting found by the search engines.
2. Structuring the press release with headers and utilizing strong and italics tags in the body copy is also a smart optimization tactic. Including your targeted keywords in the headers and applying a strong tag to a few usages of the targeted keywords in the body copy can also help promote relevancy for your press release for the targeted keyword terms.
3. Your small business will also want to Include on-text links either back to your own Website or to another authoritative voice on the topic. Including links in your optimized press release builds value for your release and can reward you with higher local small business SEO search engine results.
4. Include videos or images with your press release to increase relevancy. To capitalize on the local small business SEO angle, you should include targeted keywords in the file names and in the alt tags of the media being attached to the optimized press release.
5. Finally, don't be CHEAP! Settling for distribution of your optimized press release to non-paid sites isn't a good idea. These Free sites don't hold as much clout as the fee-based press release sites. The fee based press release distribution websites offer higher quality opportunities for backlinks and brand exposure than the free PR sites.

There are many opportunities to profit from distributing an optimized press release as part of a local SEO campaign for your small business. Back linking and brand impressions are two of the primary benefits that can help generate more traffic and sales for your Website.