So you are a small or medium size company who has a website, but your audience is profoundly local. You might be an estate agent, a solicitor, a health club or a dentist for instance. Are search engine optimisation techniques any use to you?

Of course, we would say that they certainly are; but you as the local company have to make the judgement call. In marketing the company, you have to take a lot of factors into account, of which SEO strategies are only one.

Measurement of traffic to your website is likely to be one of the marketing metrics that you take into account however, and ultimately, you are responsible for the conversion of any traffic that reaches that website. If you have an effective conversion route then increasing your website visitors is the next logical step. However, when you are local, the problem becomes more complicated. You probably meet face to face with a lot of your customers, and the visitors to your site won't be interested in what you sell if they have to travel too far to see you. Locality is key.

Therefore it is necessary to include this regionalisation information into your site when it is optimised. Plus, SEO effort needs to be focussed on attracting people from your local region. The good news is that people who want local services usually make local searches. They do look at community directories, they do add local qualifiers to searches: thus you will find "search engine optimisation hampshire" and "seo company portsmouth" in the analytics logs for us. The same is true for a good locally optimised site.

And the good news is that the visitors coming to your site will be well targeted, and good qualified visitors make the job you have to do to close the sale or get the lead much easier.