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…

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In recent studies, top e-commerce and information web sites were discovered to receive up to 85 percent of all of their visitors (and customers) from search referrals. Without doubt, for the vast majority of on-line companies, Organic SEO provides the highest possible ROI of all affordable marketing and promotional activities for businesses.

Increasingly now in the current econmoic environment companies are realising that they can no longer afford to ignore the benefits of organic Search Engine Optimisation in comparison to paid search engine marketing or Pay Per Click, the often more expensive alternative.

Although Pay Per Click is immediate and very effective it can get very expensive for the most competitive of keywords and when considering that the majority of search users will click on organic search listings as oppose to paid for listings/Ads it would be crazy to leave Organic Search Engine Optimisation out of your internet marketing mix altogether.

Although SEO takes longer (between 3-6months) than Pay Per Click advertising to achieve high rankings and despite being more work-intensive, certainly initially, a good strategically planned Search Engine Optimisation campaign will reap massive long term rewards for your business if done properly and needn’t cost the earth. If you would like to find out more about SEO then click this link Search Engine Optimisation.

Search engines drive extremely targeted traffic. The visitor who finds your site through a search engine is already actively looking for exactly what you provide. You can’t find a more targeted form of marketing than that.

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