This is actually the first in a series of articles on obtaining great results from local search engine marketing. Local SEO is going to become more and more important to businesses whose primary customers are in the same geographic area as them.

But from my observations, not many businesses are really paying attention to the massive opportunities they have for attracting high-quality prospects in an affordable way. This article and the rest in the series will shed some light on how you can go about doing that (or what to look for if you decide to outsource the task to a pro).

Local SEO - The Massive Opportunity for Great Results

The good news about all of this is that most local businesses really don't get it and are still using antiquated, interruption marketing such as radio, TV, direct mail and the like. If you can get a good ROI from it, then of course you should continue. As they say, any profitable lead is a good lead.

But with consumers becoming less and less likely to respond to such offers and taking longer to make an actual buying decision, it's becoming more important to find unique, innovative ways to educate potential buyers about your business and help move them forward to becoming paying customers.

So here are the essential steps you'll want to follow when it comes to creating an effective local SEO campaign to market your business on the Internet.

1. Get to Know Your Business - Identify your business's goals, your target market and the problems which your product or service solves. I know, not all that sexy, but vital for getting the most out of the following steps.

2. Perform Keyword Research - Determine how potential customers are searching for info related to your products and services. This goes beyond just guessing or "winging it" to brainstorm these keywords. We'll go over a few tools that make this pretty easy (though admittedly, it can be time consuming).

3. Competitive Research - Once you've found the most lucrative keywords, check out the competition. Who's already ranking for those keywords and how adept are they at SEO? How difficult will the "SEO battle" be?

4. Make Changes to Your Site - Otherwise known as "on-page optimization", this includes making changes to your existing pages, optimizing existing content, and most importantly, adding new content to draw in traffic for a wider range of keywords.

5. Roll Out a Link Building, PR and Promotion Plan - Otherwise known as "off-page optimization", this includes things like submitting your site to authoritative directories, creating and distributing content, creating and submitting press releases and promoting exceptional content that's added to your site. All of this is for the purpose of getting other sites to link to yours, both for traffic and for building up the authority and trust of your site (as seen by the search engines).

6. Testing and Tracking - You'll need to track several aspects of your promotional efforts, but most of this is automated, only requiring spot checks every so often to make sure things are on track. We'll talk about this and some automated tools that help with the process.

7. Improve Your Results - Like many things, some of this turns into a never ending process of "doing", "observing" and "adjusting" as necessary. Well, assuming that you want to improve your results.

So those are the basic steps. We'll go over each of these in more detail over the next several articles (though I doubt the articles will be in order since other items are already in the pipeline).

P.S. - Prospective clients can consider this a rough blueprint for how we would manage and implement your SEO campaign if we decide to work together. In fact, the strategy is the same whether you're talking about local sites or not...local sites are just typically easier to optimize. And for the do-it-yourselfers out there, hopefully this series will provide you with valuable insights to allow you to improve your website's results on your own.