For the average small to medium sized service based business, the majority of the business they receive comes from referrals, the yellow pages and more recently localized search.  While referrals and phone books can be great leads, the Internet has provided these service based business a phenomenal opportunity to get more business through the power of Google.

While keywords like, photographer or plumber are extremely competitive, as soon as you localize them with the city in which your business resides, the competition becomes less and less apparent.

For example, if you check to see the competition on the keywords “Photographer” you will see that there is somewhere around six million people competing to rank for this keyword.

If we add the word Vancouver to Photographer and Google “Vancouver Photographer” using the allintitle command, you will see roughly 14,000 web sites competing.

If we further break this down and choose Burnaby, a smaller city in the greater Vancouver area, ,and wrap the keywords in quotes you will see there is only 10 web sites actually competing.

Myself, I would probably try and nail Vancouver photographer just because of the larger potential, but for somebody just starting out, why not go after the really easy search terms first and expand once you’ve conquered the easier terms.

The Meat and Potatoes

Alright, now that you understand how little competition there may actually be in your market, now it is time to learn how to absolutely dominate your local niche by combining Social Media Marketing with SEO.

The three main components to this tutorial will be the following:

  • Publishing a free Press Release
  • Creating 3-5 Social Profiles on Web 2.0 sites
  • Publishing 5 pieces of content on each of the social profiles.

Press Releases

While there are many paid press release services out there, in this example I am going to give you a couple free places you can publish your press release to gain some exposure and back links.

The first step is going to be to create a news worthy press release.  If you can’t come up with any ideas, try to think of something new or innovative your company is doing.  If you are really stuck, just announce that your company will now be offering a new service that you already provide.

When writing the press release, make sure you have the keywords you want to rank for in the release at least a couple of times.  You will want to link to your home page using this set of keywords somewhere in your press release.

Once done, have your press release published on a handful of free PR sites (don’t forget to link to your site using your chosen keywords).
I recommend
PRlog.org
prbuzzer.com
articleshub.org

Social Profiles

The next step in the process is going to involve leveraging existing web communities where user generated content is accepted.  Now, before you even begin to sign up for these sites, I want to reiterate that you will NOT be spamming these sites with promotional garbage.  If you are using social media to build your brand or presence you need to understand that you can only accomplish this if you are proving value to the end user.  Most sites will allow you a resource box where you can provide a little information about yourself or your company. Provide your information with your link back to your site (using your desired keywords) in these resource boxes and leave the promotional garbage to the spammers.

Depending on how much competition you have will depend on how many different social profiles you will need to setup. Here is a list of a few to get you started.

Squidoo.com
InfoBarrel.com
Goarticles.com
Ezinearticles.com
Write4.net

Publishing Content

This is really the key to making all of this work.  In order for Google to find your links in your resource boxes on these sites you are going to want to create compelling content that provides value to the end user and helps them answer their questions.  The reason you will want to create five unique articles per site is so that you increase the chances of Google picking up your content and crediting you with your back links from the resource boxes.

When creating content, as natural as it may seem to make the content promote your business, I want you to steer clear of this and 100% concentrate on helping the user solve a problem.  By creating value for the user, you are building trust in your brand.  If they like what you’ve said, they will very likely read your resource box and follow through to your web site.  Even if they don’t follow through to your website, you are still getting a very valuable back link from your resource box that should help boost your rankings for your web site.

Tip: Most sites have no problem if you interlink your articles on their site.  If you write five articles on InfoBarrel for example, link them all together somewhere in your article to ensure that the search engines find all your content.

That is it in a nutshell.  Depending on how difficult your keyword is, you may need to setup profiles on additional sites and repeat the process, but for the most part, this should probably get you on the first page of results for your local business.

I hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial!

Don’t feel like doing this yourself? I am always available for hire, send me a message through my contact form and I will be in touch.