Many businesses these days are concerned just with getting their products bought all over the world, but can advertising to your local customers also help businesses? The question is should businesses use local search engine optimization along with regular SEO?

The obvious answer for some businesses would be yes. If the business serves only one specific geographical area or region, then local SEO is one of the first things to do get put in place.

But even if you’re not based in operations that are strictly localized, having your business optimized in the local search engines can be a positive experience. Local SEO can be used to expand the number of relevant keywords for your company. These keywords will relate to the location of your operations. These will get you rankings for more terms than those that are related directly to your business.

With the rise of the search engines and the information age, you have people from 5 to 95 using Google to look for local products and services. Forget having to flip through that 30 pound yellow page book only to realize you were looking in the wrong category. In fact, the trend in yellow page searches compared to search engines is drastically changing.

Pretend for example your a real estate developer in Asheville NC, and you want to find a local marketing company. So, you do a search for ” Asheville Marketing Company “. In less then one second you find a whole host of companies that provide local marketing services. First, Google shows you the results from their Google Local directory. Beneath that you also see the natural results, and hey us!

Search engines aren’t the only way local companies are found online. For almost every niche you’ll find a regional web directory (a web-site that lists businesses specific companies in a specific location). These directories usually list a multitude of regional companies in exchange for a small fee or advertising.

You’d be amazed at the amount of searches made for local services and products on any given day. We’ve heard time and time again from our localized clients how much their search engine marketing campaigns have helped their business grow. I believe its the most affordable and most effective form of marketing or advertising a regional company can do.

Companies like the Blue Ridge Entrepreneurial Council are helping business that move into the area get set up with loans, mentoring, networking and more.

The Flat Iron building in downtown Asheville is host of several techical and IT related companies like Scullytown.com (web designers). Visit us our Asheville marketing firm today!

Keynote speaker, Thomas Vander Wal opened up the day with a speech on the progression of how we interact with the web, social networking communities, and folksonomy among other things. According to Vander Wal, the original “I go get web” model of the internet consists of a person accessing the web through a single device (their desktop) and actively seeking information. The newer “come to me web” is much more complex, involving many individuals interacting with each other and via numerous devices (laptops, blackberries, etc.). The central characteristic of the “come to me web” is our ability to save important information and streamline the retrieval process according to our own taxonomy (enter tags and folksonomy). No longer are we expected to navigate through layers of webpages before we finally connect with what we are looking for. As the web develops, more and more information is being delivered to us based on our preferences and online behavior (enter social communities, RSS feeds, and yes….more tagging). The overall model is shifting from navigation to attraction and the new web is multiplying the power of the internet instead of adding it.

Additional information on the conference and Vander Wal is available here, here, and here.

Asheville is not only a great place to live, but it’s also an excellent choice for business as well. Forbes.com cites North Carolina as “the clear winner” for “the best place to do business or start a career”. Raleigh snagged the top spot with several other NC cities ranking including Asheville at 23rd. Forbes notes that will many careers garner more income in the west, the cost of living in the southeast more than makes up for this discrepency.

We also think Asheville is a great place to live and do business as well, although we may be just a little biased. ; )