By 
For the past few months, I’ve been fighting to get my restaurant business in Denver, Colorado to appear on the front pages of Google Places, Yahoo Local, and Bing. I finally found the perfect solution to all my difficulties: local SEO. I contacted a professional SEO company that provides local SEO services. After analyzing my business and its visibility issues, the SEO team presented me with an SEO package that included a wide range of strategies designed to improve my website’s search engine ranking and drive more traffic and sales. Let’s see how these strategies worked to promote my business.
Local listing sites: Local SEO makes use of local listing sites (eg Yellow Pages, Yahoo, Google, Bing, etc.) that target local/geographical terms, to optimize local search results. The SEO Company provided strategies that helped increase my local business listing ranking on these sites. Now, when someone searches for Denver-specific data related to my business, the information about my business that is stored on all of these sites appears as a top search result.
With improved online visibility, I find that more local customers have started visiting my website, which is working to promote my brand. My service provider took it upon themselves to choose only Google-authorized local listing sites to promote my small business.
back linking: Local SEO services include building inbound links to a business website. According to the latest Google Penguin update, my SEO service provider took it upon itself to create backlinks to my website from trusted websites with content relevant to my business. I realized that relevance was crucial because search engines identify keywords based on backlinks. Another significant aspect is the link speed or the speed at which backlinks are created. The SEO team built backlinks slowly and systematically, as any unnatural speed could cause Google to consider my links as spam. In addition, they also employed tactics such as social bookmarking, article and forum submissions, and other off-page activities. Keyword variations, brand text, and other strategies were adopted to improve results.
Social media promotion: My service provider also used effective social media optimization strategies to attract my target audience to my website. They built my business profile on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more and created posts on them that helped drive local customers to my website. They spread the posts through the ‘Share’ or ‘Like’ buttons. As search engines, particularly Google, display search results from social networking sites (Facebook, Google+, Twitter and more), these profiles also help drive more organic traffic to my site. The SEO team also promoted my business by creating videos and images of my restaurant and sharing them via YouTube and Pinterest.
social media marketing means maximum utilization of marketing potential with features (installation of paid advertising, contests, commercial pages in the case of Google+ and more) on social networking sites. In my experience, focusing on a particular social media site for marketing purposes (Facebook Marketing, Twitter Marketing) is the best way to promote your business online.
Online advertising
Pay-per-click advertising (paying money to search engines to show your website in the first search results) is considered a powerful way to promote online businesses due to its easy implementation, high return on investment (ROI) and better traceability. The SEO team provided my company with PPC advertising services, also known as Geo-Targeted PPC. The advertising was focused on the Denver area, which resulted in more local customers visiting my website. Both open keywords and focused keywords were used in my geo-targeted PPC.
The local SEO services provided by the SEO company help attract the attention of more local customers to my website and helped in promoting my restaurant online which I definitely could not have achieved on my own.