By Kenton Newby

An increasing number of people are now using the Internet to search for local businesses that provide the products and services they need.  However, most local business owners easily find themselves confused and frustrated when trying to figure out how to tap into the growing number of searches for that represent hot prospects for their business.  Here are a few tips to help you cut through the noise and start getting real results from your local SEO efforts.

1. Use the Right Tools to Choose Your Keywords

The first thing to consider is what keywords your prospects are using to search for your type of products or services. Specifically, is anyone searching for those types of products and how many searches are being done per month.

Google recently started offering more of their search volume data and their free keyword tool is an excellent resource for finding out how many people are searching for terms related to your business. You might also get some ideas for misspellings or synonyms that people use in addition to the words you come up with on your own. These can be pleasantly surprising and profitable.

2. Focus on Local Keywords

If you’re primarily a local business, you’ll probably only want to focus on local search terms anyway. But this is great because, at least for now, local search terms for many businesses are easier to get higher rankings for compared to broader terms targeting customers nationwide. For instance, it’s probably easier to obtain high rankings for “Maryland carpet cleaner” than “carpet cleaner”. And if you’re only serving a particular geographic area, you probably don’t want website visitors from outside that area anyway. The good news is that the keyword tool mentioned above also allows you to see how many people are searching for local terms like these. You may be surprised at how many people search for local terms…a trend that is likely to increase over the coming years.

3. Spy on the Competition (Both Local and National Players)

I’m sure you’ve heard the quote from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” which states, “Know your enemy and know yourself and you need not fear the result of a hundred battles…“. That same type of thinking applies to business too and finding out what your competition is doing online can be extremely valuable. Again, the keyword tool that Google offers can be a great way to do this by simply entering a competitor’s website address instead of a list of keywords. Google will scan the competing site and show you a list of keywords that Google thinks that site is about. This can be a goldmine of info since your competitors might be focusing on keywords (and aspects of your target market) that you’ve mistakenly neglected.

4. Create Good Content (And Consider Using in Offline Marketing Too)

Once you have an idea of what keywords you want to target, it’s time to start creating content. This content can be (and should be) in multiple formats including text articles, PDF reports, audio and video. In fact, one of the best strategies is to take one article idea and develop content around that idea in a number of formats. So you could write an article, record it as an audio, create a quick video and revamp it as a blog post. This is a great way to get the most out of a great content idea.

5. Syndicate your content

Once you have your content created, you should syndicate it. That simply means distributing your content throughout the web. So you can submit your article to high-quality article directories like EZineArticles.com, post your video to YouTube, add your audio to iTunes as a podcast and put a blog post on your own website. Imagine someone searching for a keyword related to your market and the first results that come back are (1) your YouTube video, (2) your EzineArticles article, (3) the post on your blog and (4) someone else who has used your video on their high-ranking website. No matter where that visitor goes, all roads lead back to your site!

6. Don’t submit to 1000’s of search engines

One thing you’ll find many search engine marketing companies offering is to submit your site to some ridiculous amount of search engines. Quick question – How many search engines do YOU use? Probably only one or two, and most likely, either Google, Yahoo or MSN. So there’s no need to submit to 1000’s of search engines. In fact, the three just listed account for probably 95% of all search traffic and most of the others are complete junk or useless directories. Targeted directory submissions are okay, but don’t pay for some mass submission pitch that’s doomed to fail from the start.

7. Submit press releases

Submitting press releases is a great way to generate buzz online about your business. Not only that, it can be a great way to get links from high-quality news sites and other sites related to your business. Keep it professional and not too sales-ey.