One of the best ways for local businesses to promote themselves is by getting local search engine traffic. Let’s take a look at a few local SEO strategies that will get your site ranking better. You can use SEO tools for this, for example, check out review of SECockpit .

One of the simplest SEO tips that you can take home is creating optimized local classified listings. This is a simple way to take advantage of local search efforts because the big search engines really like those kinds of sites and the more you use them the more likely it is that you can send targeted local traffic to your business’s website. Craigslist should be your starting point because it is the most popular of all of the classified websites. What you need to do is make a regular habit of posting optimized ads to Craigslist to help your business. This ad needs to be directly targeted towards your chosen niche. Take care that your ad is simple and not garish. When you write the ad, focus on the title because this is what increases most of the response. Use the keyword phrase and your city and state in your title. You can treat the craigslist ad as your landing page, because many times you will notice that it will even outrank your main site. The best strategy for business owners is to think of Craigslist as a funnel for targeted traffic and your website. Apart from that, you can use USFreeAds, which doesn’t work as well as Craigslist, but nevertheless it can give you a good response since it is a well ranked classified oriented site. You can either try to piggy back your site’s traffic from the classifieds sites but your main goal should be to simply use them to send targeted traffic to your business directly. 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). Because this is allowed and you can benefit from it quite a bit, why not do it? Make sure you mention it in your email signatures, thank you page of your contact form, invoices, etc. You need to say something like “It would be nice if you would take a moment to review my business on this local website.” 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. Even if you are trying other things as well, make sure to integrate this tip because doing so can help your business exponentially.

Diversifying your anchor text is something you need to do. Long tail keywords can do quite a bit to help you with your Local SEO efforts–every SEO marketer understands just how valuable long tail keywords can be with search engine marketing. This will give you the opportunity to work with the different anchor texts and that means that you should try to have a large variety of diversified anchor text to expand your reach. Using “New York Chocolate Store” is just one option available to you if you are selling chocolate in New York (to use one example). Be creative–there are other options available to you like “Chocolate Stores in Manhattan, New York” and “Chocolate Store in New York.” Whatever you do, just remember that the search engines highly value the anchor text, which means you should try and put in as many variations as possible to increase your rankings. In conclusion, local SEO is the way to go if you want more exposure, period.