Local London Internet Marketing
In almost all consumer business areas the online competition for high ranking organic and paid search non-geographic keyword phrases is extremely high. Of course, you can achieve high rankings for generic keywords but if you are pursuing organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as a strategy then you need to be patient for the results and put in a lot of work or pay someone else to do it for you and if you are utlising Paid Search then although the results are almost instantaneous you need to be prepared to pay a high Cost per Click (CPC) which depending on your conversion rate could end up being very expensive.
Therefore, if you want to compete for the generic non-geographic keywords whether you’re opting for a strategy of SEO or Paid Search or indeed both, you’ll need to be prepared to invest both time (either yours or someone elses) and money - you’re objectives, resources and budget will define exactly how much of both. That’s exactly what successful worldwide, nationwide or wholly online businesses targeting the most competitive non-geographic keywords have to do.
If however, you’re primarily an offline ‘bricks and mortar’ business that relies on footfall from your surrounding area and are by your very essence targeting a specific village, town, city or county then Local Search is defnitely the route you should be considering as your starting point. Afterall, if let’s say you’re a restaurant in Notting Hill, do you really need to be promoting yourself to people outside of London? Probably not, if potential customers were coming from outside London on business or for a holiday and they wanted to find a restaurant online then they’d most likely search for something like a ‘restaurant in notting hill’. So on that basis you’d definitely want to promote yourself geographically for the search term Notting Hill but then you may also want to expand your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) whether SEO or Paid Seartch to include nearby villages like Kensington and Westborune Grove, maybe West London or perhaps even London as a whole. Either way, if you’re limited on budget and resource you stand a much greater chance of success by localising your SEM.
I’ll use a client case study and SEO to demonstrate this further. The client is called Beautcamp Pilates and they’re credited with bringing reformer pilates over to London from LA. Their business is extremely successful due to their professionalism and quality of service and they have large studios in both East and West London. As with many ‘first movers’ that are successful you get a lot of competition surfacing after the event all playing catch-up, all searching for a piece of that success and competition is good thing so long as it is ethical…
With all of this competition rising up and the rapid expansion of Beautcamp we could have started by optimising for the keyword ‘pilates’ which gets on average 368,000 searches in google per month but Beautcamp is only based in London at the moment and realistically why would people trying to find a local pilates studio in London just type in ‘pilates’? Well, they probably wouldn’t, it’s much more likely that they’re searching for information about pilates like what it is and how to do it.
So on that basis we created an SEO strategy that would first target the London villages where the studios are in or near to followed by East and West London and then for London as a whole. We chose to do it this way round as it was much easier to gain high rankings for the villages first as they were less competitive, followed by East and West London which are more competitive but nowhere near as competitive as London which is highly competitive. Once you gain a solid footing in the search engine rankings it’s much easier to progress from there.
The search term ‘Pilates London’ received over 9,000 searches last month alone and Beautcamp Pilates is now ranked No 1 in Google for that search term. The local SEO strategy definitely paid off and in under six months they’re receiving over 10,000 organic visits to their site each month with a really good conversion rate and yet there’s still so much more to be done.
Here are some of the current Beautcamp Pilates keyword postions:
| KEYWORD | GOOGLE POSITION |
| pilates london | 1 |
| pilates west london | 3 |
| pilates east london | 6 |
| pilates city | 2 |
| pilates in london | 1 |
| pilates classes london | 1 |
| pilates class london | 4 |
| pilates studios london | 3 |
| pilates reformer london | 1 |
| power pilates london | 2 |
| cheap pilates london | 1 |
| free pilates london | 1 |
| pilates the city | 1 |
| pilates bayswater | 1 |
| pilates westbourne grove | 1 |
| pilates islington | 3 |
| pilates paddington | 2 |
| pilates kensington and chelsea | 4 |
| pilates farringdon | 7 |
| pilates clerkenwell | 9 |
If you would like to find out more about Beautcamp and Pilates then visit Ten Pilates Reasons To Get In Shape and if you would like to find out more about how we can optimise your business to the top of the search engines then visit SEO Services London or email us at enquiries@hatchnow.com
