In the online marketing world there are possibly hundreds of ways to get your message out there. But what’s often overlooked is local online marketing, which is where you target your online message to appeal to those in your business locality.

It may seem obvious that if you’re a plumber then you’ll only want to promote yourself to a local market, since traveling to other cities cuts into potentially billable time. So you’d look to optimise your website for keywords that include your town name, and maybe buy keywords on the search engines for terms such as ‘plumber in Leicester’ (with Leicester being your town).

The less obvious benefit is that local online marketing is normally cheaper than trying to reach a much wider audience.It actually helps the search engines to give you a higher ranking if you’re a local business than if you were a regional or national organisation. If you look at the image below it shows the Google Adwords keyword planner and its own estimates on what the search terms will cost you per click. As you can see, the localised search term ‘car insurance uk’ is much cheaper than ‘car insurance’

Trying to reach generic search terms like ‘car insurance’ will cost you a packet but if you narrow down the search a little you’ll find that buying terms becomes much cheaper and easier to compete on. So changing your search term to ‘Leicester car Insurance’ is likely to reach those in your local market.

Now it’s easy to fall into thinking that ‘not as many people will be searching for Leicester car insurance’ and you’d be right. But the upside is that if you’re a local business then it makes sense that you’d compete for local search terms.

Better still is that the competition won’t be as fierce. There won’t be as many businesses competing for local search terms and this gives you something of an advantage if you work smart with your online marketing and SEO.

And, if that wasn’t enough, smaller businesses tend not to do as well at online marketing and search engine optimisation simply because the majority of them don’t have the time or money to learn and apply the techniques required to do better.

So, remember: if you’re a local business with a local target market then local online marketing should be the first thing in your mind when it comes to promoting online.

We’ll be covering more on this in coming articles but if you have any thoughts or success stories then please write them in the comments below, it would be great to hear from you.