There are so many factors you must look at when you are beginning to market your small business online.
Choosing to market locally or globally is one aspect you must consider before you take your first step.
The web host you choose to host your website can have an impact on your search engine results if you are developing a local marketing strategy.
Some of the big search engines are divided geographically into regions and countries.
If you have a UK based business and your target market are local or national customers, your site will perform better in the search engines if you choose a local web host and a regionally targeted domain name.
This will give the search engines a very clear inclination of where your website should fit into the scheme of things.
With sites like Google now serving their searchers with the most relevant local sites first, it makes sense that if you want to corner the local market you need to be sure they know where you are located.
As such, you should make sure you use a local registrar to register your domain name; use a country specific domain extension such as.
co.
uk,.
ca, or.
de depending on where your business is located and choose a web host within your country to host your web files.
This will give you a definite advantage over your local competition who has opted to use an international service for their web services.
The whole idea of marketing wisely is to reduce the amount of work it will take to get the desired results.
Small things like using the best services for your business can significantly reduce the amount of time you must spend on marketing and implementing SEO strategies.
Because you have chosen to communicate to the search engines about the location of your business through the selection of services you use, you will not need to spend extra time sending that message by other means.
Your choice of hosting and domain names will passively do that work for you.
To reinforce this message to the search engines, you can then use free sites like Google Pages to pinpoint yourself in the regional listings within the search results.
Make sure you include regional keywords in your on-page SEO elements and your off-page link building strategies.
With very focused and strategic use of local marketing, it is possible for you to take the commanding lead for your niche by reaching your target audience and drive walk-in traffic to your business.