If you want to get more targeted traffic from people in your area, local SEO is the best way to do it. This article will be focusing on some effective ways to use local SEO to get your website a higher search engine ranking.

The key to local SEO is to put yourself in the place of your prospective customers when they do searches. Before you can do SEO for your site, you have to get into the customer's mind. The real question you have to ask is, if you were the customer, what word or term would you search under if you were looking for one of your own products? Pretend for a moment that your store carries golf accessories and nothing else. People who search for the word "golf" are probably not going to be your customers, as this is a very general term. Other searchers may be looking for "golf instruction," which isn't related to what your store sells. Someone who enters "golf accessories," though, is a likely customer for your store, so this is the kind of keyword to be focusing on. It's common for website owners in search of local traffic to ignore potentially profitable keywords that don't get tens of thousands of searches. They focus instead on the keywords with the most searches and traffic but are very hard to rank for. It helps you to target the most effective keywords if you can put yourself in the customer's place. As you test various keywords and come up with more appropriate ones, you will get more traffic and you'll be able to rank well for many different keywords in your niche. Most local websites that are targeted by local businesses are fine with the idea of a business owner asking customers to log on to the site and leave reviews (Yelp is a good example of this). With this being allowed by the websites and knowing that it will benefit your local SEO efforts why not make a practice of doing this? Be sure to mention it every place you can (e-mail signature lines, contact forms, invoices and more). You can say something as simple as "Hi it would be great if you can take out time to review our business on XYZ Local." Even though you are not able to control any of the text in the reviews, whether you get good or bad reviews, having them online adds credibility to your business and makes you look more reliable to new customers. This is one tip that you need to put into practice no matter what else you do because it has the potential to really help you out with your business's rankings online.

If you can get significant local websites to link to your site, this will help you rank well in your area with the search engines. You can start off by getting listed in the Better Business Bureau, local chamber of commerce website or find some more similar websites that offer big benefits. You can find such sites by Googling your city name along with the keyword "business directory." Contact these groups and find out what it takes to get a listing with them. It doesn't take much time to find such sites, so make sure you're putting in the effort in this area. In summary: local search engine optimization does require some extra effort on your part but later on, when you have an easier time of reaching your target market, you'll know the extra work has paid off.