Guest Column By Heather Lutze: Expand by thinking global, acting local

Many small-business owners think that to be successful, they must dominate the world. After all, their product is just as good for people in Ohio as it is for people in Missouri. But often the real business is right under your nose — right in your own backyard.
For many small-business owners, understanding the nuances of how to attract and capture a local search audience and convert them into paying clients is a big challenge. Fortunately, you can increase your “findability,” dominate Web search results and attract new customers in your own hometown.
The question is: How do you stay competitive in a local market where competition is fierce and your company offers the same perceived product or service as everyone else in the area? How do you achieve a real competitive edge in a localized market? Often, it’s about two key things: getting social and getting local.
If you want to stand out in your local market and increase your Web ranking, here are some key ways to get social, get local and get a whole lot of business.
Get social
Social media marketing is an excellent tool in an Internet marketer’s toolkit. It gives you a great opportunity to demonstrate how your company is different, and it gives a real voice to your online presence. Many businesses that do some social media marketing do a good job of helping consumers find their social media platforms off the main website. And, for the most part, they do keep their accounts updated with relevant, high-value information. However, in order to harness the potential of these platforms, you need to make a few changes with a localized spin that will go a long way for search engine marketing.
Tip No. 1: Get everyone — and everything — on the same page.
Your blog is the most important social media element your company can create. As such, it needs to be a part of your main website, and it must support your brand. Just having a blog up somewhere on the Web doesn’t cut it. In fact, you can have the most informational, well-organized blog in the world, but if it isn’t an integrated part of your website, it’s useless.
Unfortunately, most businesses have a blog that acts as its own website and is totally separate from the company’s main website. As such, the blog often gets more traffic and better Web rankings than the main site. The blog gets all the credit for the business owner’s regular posts, and the website gets none. Ideally, you want your website to get everything. The goal is not for consumers to read your blog; it’s for them to read your blog and then visit your website and take action.
Therefore, port your blog directly into your main website. Ideally, users will see the same header and footer as the main website, which makes it very easy for them to jump from a blog post to a relevant section on your website.
Tip No. 2: A little keyword research goes a long way.
If you are going to take the time and effort to keep your social media platforms up-to-date and informational, then you probably want your potential customers to read them. The true power of social media marketing is the ability to gain search engine ranking by optimizing your platforms, thereby getting found in the search engines and getting traffic to your platforms.
Chances are you’ve already done the hard work. You’re giving great information, uploading videos and images and giving customers a real value-add. Now you simply need to pick one strategic keyword per post and do a little post optimization, and you’ll have search engine ranking. For each blog, use a keyword tool (such as Google’s free one, https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), find a keyword with good search volume, and simply add it into your post title and throughout the content.
Now, here is the trick for using a keyword tool to localize posts. You probably won’t see the tools diving in deep enough to get search volume for Columbia, Mo., or any town for that matter. However, what works for Americans, works for Columbians. This means if there is great search volume under cosmetic dentistry, for example, then there is probably good search volume under cosmetic dentistry, Columbia Mo.” So think global, but act local with your keywords.
Get local
When it comes to marketing on the Internet, the sky is truly the limit for narrowing in and getting in front of your target audience. Local searching is no exception. Here are a few tricks of the trade that can help you dominate local search results.
Tip No. 1: Use geo-targeting carefully.
Many local businesses that do pay-per-click advertising use geo-targeted criteria, which means your PPC ad will only show if the searcher has a local IP address in the geographic area you’ve defined. The biggest gap in running only a geo-targeted by IP address campaign is that people who are not physically located in your area when searching won’t see your ads. So if someone lives around the corner from you, but this week they happen to be across the country visiting their Aunt Betty and using her computer to find some local businesses to call next week when they’re back in town, your PPC ads won’t show.
For this reason, geo-targeted pay-per-click accounts need to have two campaigns. Campaign 1 is the localized campaign that only shows ads to consumers in your area, and campaign 2 is a statewide or national campaign with keywords that have local modifiers. Using our cosmetic dentistry example from earlier, in campaign 1 you could show ads for keywords such as “cosmetic dentistry” and know that only consumers in the surrounding areas would see them. For campaign 2, you could show ads for keywords such as “cosmetic dentistry Columbia, Mo.,”  and know that regardless of where that person is located, they have a need for a dentist in Columbia.

Tip No. 2: Use Local Business Center ads.
Local Business Center ads are a fantastic way to gain additional localized ranking in the search engines. Setting up a Local Business Center ad account in Google is free; all you need is a local address, and you are good to go.
Local Business Center gives you the opportunity to connect your local listings with your Google Adwords account, which means that when someone searches for your keyword in your local area, your listing will appear with an address and phone number under the standard ad text.
Even better, Local Business Center ads can be optimized. For example, if one of your local listings is titled “Columbia Dentist,” you could label it “Columbia Dentist, Cosmetic Dentistry” and gain ranking for someone searching for cosmetic dentistry in Fairfield. By using a keyword tool and including your keyword in the local listing, small businesses can take full advantage of a local Internet marketing approach.
Tip No. 3: Get the right local domain for the right audience.
As much as we are targeting local keywords and local listings, there is a fine line between local and too local. For example, some businesses put their phone number or address (or part of it) in their domain name. Whereas an address and/or phone number is certainly local, it is just a bit too local. Searchers definitely identify with localized keywords; however, typically they don’t search down to the street number or phone number until they are looking for directions or a specific provider. Therefore, get a website address that is local-keyword rich. A small change in your Web address can make a very big change in your search engine findability. v
Heather Lutze has spent the past 10 years as CEO of The Findability Group, formerly Lutze Consulting, a search engine marketing firm that works with companies to attain maximum Internet exposure. She is the author of The FindAbility Formula. www.FindabilityGroup.com.