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Search Engine Optimization Tactics: Local Search How To Use Graphics and Flash

With the global economy struggling, acquiring new customers is top of mind for most organizations.

Did you know that 50-70% of consumer and business purchasers start with a search engine like Google? If your website doesnt appear at the top of a search engine results page (sponsored ads or organic search results), youre losing potential customers to companies that do rank higher.

What can you do? Ill share with you my top strategies and tactics that can help you acquire new customers via search engine optimization and advertising.

1. Local Search Engine Advertising. For businesses that serve specific geographic regions (i.e. Denver, Colorado), you can create search engine ads in Google and Yahoo that only appear to people in your area.

How does this work? A search engine like Google uses a computers IP address and other information to discover where someone is searching (including city and state).

Why does Google care where a person is located? Googles mission is to give their end users the best search results possible. So if I need a someone to walk my dog in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, it does me little good to receive a paid search result from Arizona. This is a real example - my brother has a petsitting business, and Ive used local Google search engine advertising to drive new clients to his organization.

Thus Google (and the others) tries to match search results to the geographic location of the person searching.

How does Google make money? Google gives businesses and organizations the ability to display paid advertisements (sponsored results) on search results pages. These ads are triggered by keywords you choose (more on this in a different strategy).

You dont have to pay for your ad to display; you pay Google only when someone clicks on your ad. The technical term is Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising. The more relevant your ad (more on this later), the less you have to pay for specific keywords, and the higher up you will appear in the sponsored advertising results.

Local Search CPC Ads. In Google Adwords, you can create an advertising campaign that will target someone in a specific city or state. You can even specify a 5, 10 or 25 mile radius from a specific location (like your retail showroom or office). Below your local ad, Google will place the name of your local area (i.e. Denver, Colorado)... making it more likely that someone searching in your area will choose your organization vs. an out-of-town competitor.

Local CPC Ads are usually a more cost effective option than a national search engine advertising campaign. As a general rule of thumb, the more geographically targeted and specific you can be, the less money youll need to pay to acquire new customers. And make sure you have conversion tracking code placed on your site, so you can measure and track how much youre paying for each new customer via local search engine advertising.

2. Dont Confuse The Search Engines With Graphics. Search engines are really good at reading text. But theyve very easily confused. And if Google gets confused when it crawls through your site, you wont rank very high in search results.

Search engines, for example, cant read words that are contained in graphics or flash animation. So if your companys name is only contained in a graphic on your site, this content is invisible to a search engine. Same thing goes for product or service names.

The root of the problem lies with graphic designers. Graphic designers are really good at building graphics. And dont take this to mean I dont like graphic designers. (I employ a bunch of them, but they know how to do SEO-friendly design.)

But most websites are designed by graphic designers who are really good at building graphics, and less interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It takes a bit more time to have content placed in text, and use a stylesheet to format it so that a search engine can read it. Especially when its just so easy to create a good looking graphic in photoshop.

Heres an example of a site that uses all flash (and is invisible to search engines):
http://www.gelazzi.com/

While it looks pretty to humans, to Google the content is completely invisible. Heres how the site appears to Google in its cache:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:-qvxrs72gygJ:www.gelazzi.com/ http://www.gelazzi.com/

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