SEO really effective marketing for small towns?

captchadreams

captchadreams

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I'm curious.. is SEO really worth it for local businesses in small towns?

my towns population is around 21k.. 15min away there is a little bigger city.. population is around 49k (huntington, wv). but nothing like the major US cities.

I got a tip before when doing keyword research to use the nearest bigger city to figure out which keywords to use and just replace with my town. which is a good idea.. but I'm still pondering whether SEO would even be worth it.. I don't think they'll get as many customers as they would in a bigger city.. so should I be focusing towards a different marketing strategy? such as social media sites.. or does it really just depend on the business... or what?
 
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you will never find out unless you take action, get off your butt and go and test the service and see if it works, 99% people fail in business cause they never take action.
 
Yes this guy above is totally right. I've tested this & the results were different for each town, it depends on many factors. Like if most households in the area own a PC, whether it's a new estate or old country town. These things play a big part, I've had clients get more work from a sub domain being ranked on the 1st page for a town with a population of 15k, yet the town with 50k population got them hardly any calls.

I setup advertising campaigns targeting the main city with their home page, then creating sub domains to target every other suburb/town around the city. This combination mixed with Adwords brings the client some serious traffic, once setup right & everything is ranked well.
 
Small towns generally means less net searches, or atleast ones you can find a record of.
 
Gold Hat said:
you will never find out unless you take action, get off your butt and go and test the service and see if it works, 99% people fail in business cause they never take action.
Click to expand...

Why wasn't the thread ended when this was said!?!?
 
I think it worth it :) is also very easy to make local SEO just need to find a good way to attract clients
 
Business Directory said:
Yes this guy above is totally right. I've tested this & the results were different for each town, it depends on many factors. Like if most households in the area own a PC, whether it's a new estate or old country town. These things play a big part, I've had clients get more work from a sub domain being ranked on the 1st page for a town with a population of 15k, yet the town with 50k population got them hardly any calls.

I setup advertising campaigns targeting the main city with their home page, then creating sub domains to target every other suburb/town around the city. This combination mixed with Adwords brings the client some serious traffic, once setup right & everything is ranked well.
Click to expand...

thanks for info.. + the subdomains targeting the other cities around here sounds good.. cause there's many. the only thing that sucks is I can't really get "city + keyword" and then do "city.city+keyword" .. but most of the businesses that have websites already I could do this with.. "city.business.com/keyword.html" ..is that how you did it pretty much for the link structure?
 
i kinda figured you had some sort of directory type thing.

most of the local businesses i have will have their own website though.. so I'll probably have to do city.theirsite.com/keyword.html or i guess i could try citykeyword.theirsite.com.

does the subdomains work out better for you then putting the keyword in the filename?

have you tested? or haven't really had problems getting to the top with it in the subdomain
 
BTW I don't work with this customer, that's why the sites look like shit. He was going to be one of those clients that expected to much and hassled me over $150 per month. So I didn't bother with him and told him to find someone else after the 1st few phone calls, will be taking his info off site when I can be bothered.
 
Good question, PR helps sub domains a lot. If you have a high PR like 5-6 on your home page and you create a sub domain with good content & SEO friendly, you should be able to rank well almost instantly. But it all depends on how competitive the keyword is that you're targeting.
 
my keyword will pretty much have no competition at all.. since i'll be doing citykeyword .. like the only thing i've seen that has competition on google keyword tool is hotels and that's it honestly. even dentists and doctors have medium competition.. everything else is low.

i was thinking about trying to rank city + night life and a few variations and goto bars after getting ranked like the people were doing with dentists.. i think all the variations got around 200-300 exact match monthly searches.
 
Nice post. Thanks for sharing your views folks. It was very informative and useful.
 
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