Not surprising to me though, Google has recently stated that 20% of all searches are related to location. That translates to approximately 2.6 billion searches a month, and that number is increasing by about 50% per year.

But how you can take advantage of this local search trend to generate more qualified leads to your website? There are three steps you can do about it.

First of all, find out the geo modified keyword phrases for your business. What is Geo-modified keyword? Simple, it is the best word to describe your business or professionalism plus the city, town or even postal code of your area. For example, if you are a real estate agent who specializes in selling West Vancouver properties. The best Geo-modified keywords for your business are “West Vancouver real estate agent”, “Realtor in West Van”, “selling properties in West Vancouver” and so on.

Secondly, you will want to optimize those geo-modified keywords in your website (if you have one), which I call it “on page SEO“. How to do the optimization job? Easy but could take relatively long time. Technically, you will want to mention the keywords almost everywhere and as often as possible. (But don’t overdo it, otherwise Google could think it spam.) What I mean by “everywhere” – In the site meta keyword, site description, site title, blog title, blog content, footer, deep linkings and so on.

Thirdly, you will need to hire local marketing company or professional to do all kinds of search engine marketing, which I call it “off page SEO“, to push your website to rank for those Geo-modified keywords. Although nobody (including Google itself) could guarantee the rankings of your site for any keyword, meaning you will find your website’s ranking will be up and down for any keyword, the overall ranking of your website can be improved in the long term if that marketing company or professional use the correct and most efficient marketing strategies.

For most of the experienced internet marketers, we are quite familiar with the general rules of SEO. But not quite the same when SEO a mobile site.

Considering having 10% of search volume from mobile searches in 2010, and expected to reach 16% from mobile queries by Sep 2011 (according to Performics), it is really a must to SEO a site both for desktop computers and mobile devices, i.e. iPhone, smartphone.

Keyword research is always a key for any type of SEO and/or SEM job. Thanks to Google Mobile Keyword Research Tool, we now can accurately figure out the monthly searches for any particular keyword phrase from those mobile devices.

Remember, the bouncing rate and average time length that every visitor stay on the site, are still playing an very important role for search engines to decide whether to rank a site to the top page or not. That’s why it is so important to direct each mobile queries to a mobile formatted site, also known as mobile friendly site.

iPhone and Android App Marketing

We Generate QRcode And Track Performace

We Do SMS Marketing And Track Performance

Why? Because organic search engine still reigns.

Natural search results, which are also known as organic search results, are critical to be successful in marketing online. After all, people are easily giving up after just one or two clicks when searching for something on the internet.

According to iCrossing, of all the organic search visits, 95.8% were on Google’s first page and then left for other search terms; only 2.5% of them went to the second page; and the remaining 1.7% might go further to third or forth pages.

That was true across the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing), with at least 95% of traffic from each originating from the first page of results after a nonbranded search. Less than 2% of search-referred traffic came from clickers persistent enough to look for results after the second page.

That’s why businesses owners are willing to invest big in search engine optimization so they will appear in those results and benefit from the huge portion of clicks that go to the top hits.

Note: The market share of organic search visits between three major search engines: Google 74%; Yahoo 13%; Bing 13%.

Every business tend to brand its uniqueness against many other competitors who provide same or similar products or services. For the purpose of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), branding sometimes may go conflict with all the marketing effort to get traffic with high relevancy.

For example, a video conferencing company spends all its marketing efforts to brand themselves as a “video communications” company, just because their competitors do conferencing. But the problem is their customers do not see them as a “video communications” company. Their clients want video conferencing, and that’s what they see them as.

Keyword Search SEM

So when they put “video communications” as their main keyword to SEO their pages and hyperlinks, they got problem: their prospects couldn’t find them easily on search engines. That is a big mistake. A severe marketing mistake!

The correct way to both brand their business and to better SEM, they should add keyword modifier to their main keyword “video conferencing”. One way of doing that is to put location, i.e. county, zip code, into the main keyword.  “video conferencing Vancouver”  is a good keyword modifier sample. To add words which describing your quality is another great idea. For example, they can use “best video conferencing” or a combination of two as “best video conferencing Vancouver”.

Overall, it’s not an easy job to find those keyword modifiers which are both relevent to your services and attracting as many highly targeted traffics as possible to your site. It takes time and efforts in investigating and splitting test.

To employ a SEM expert to do the job for you will save you huge amount of time and money, if you don’t know how to do them yourself.