Global Versus Local Marketing
Identifying your potential customer base is the most important element of any successful marketing model. That’s a given. Who and where your customers and clients are will dictate your marketing approach, and this is particularly important from an SEO standpoint.
In order to reap the greatest return on your internet marketing investment, it’s imperative you grasp which customers you can realistically hope to reach. For while the internet reaches world wide, that doesn’t mean your company does.
Whether your business caters to a global, national or local market will determine how focused your targeted keywords and phrases should be, and could be the difference between getting top five search engine rankings or being relegated to the second page. A small company shouldn’t invest money and man power to target competitive phrases in an attempt to court distant customers that can’t enjoy its services anyway, nor would a larger corporation be wise to limit the scope of its campaign to only the market where its headquarters is based.
Businesses hoping to establish a global market base will naturally target broader and more general terms that could be searched by anyone anywhere in the world, while smaller local companies will receive a greater return by skipping the most competitive phrases and strictly targeting narrowly-focused long-tail phrases that only local customers would ever search. Moreover, if a company’s products or services can be enjoyed by consumers in countless local markets (For example, a hotel chain), it will want to develop SEO campaigns of both local and global scopes.
Here are some examples. Say you own a small Midwest firm that provides financial advice to local citizens. You would obviously want to target phrases like “Financial Advisor” or “Financial Consultant,” but so do firms across the country that are just like yours. It would then be of little value to you if people on the east or west coasts are finding your website, for they are only interested in finding a local firm they can drive to. Thus, phrases like “Financial advisor in Des Moines, Iowa” or “Chicago, Illinois Financial Consultant Group” will not only be more valuable, but they will also be easier to achieve top search engine rankings for.
On the other hand, say you own a chain of luxury hotels or steak houses that has establishments in cities all over the country. It would be highly beneficial to rank for general phrases like “Best Steak Houses” and “Best Steaks” that anyone could search, as well as geo-targeted phrases like “Hotels in Chicago” and “Top Dallas Hotels” that are only searched by consumers in specific markets.
While it might be nice to think your small company can achieve world wide success, your expectations have to be realistic if you are going to get a good return on your internet marketing investment. Take some time to identify who and where your consumers or clients are, and your search engine optimization campaign will be more successful. Small companies that are content with dominating just local search engine rankings might one day see their company grow into a world wide enterprise.
Joe Winn has been the Director of Content Development and an Internet Marketing Specialist at Blue Traffic since 2008. His primary responsibilities include developing unique website content, conducting competitor research, and implementing advanced search engine optimization strategies for clients in a variety of industries.
