SEO in Campbell River

Campbell River BC, is a small city about 80Km north of the TIMR offices in Comox. While we have clients in that area, we haven't targeted that area in any of our advertising. In this article I will show you some simple techniques that we would use to target a smaller market, such as Campbell River. I will use SEO as the key word, but we could use any of our other services such as web design, online marketing, or SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

This method uses a valuable, but often overlooked, technique for getting higher rankings on the Search Engine Results Page ( SERP ). It all has to do with how people search. Someone trying to find a plumber in Campbell River, is going to enter "plumber campbell river" into the search engine. Localizing the search lets them find exactly what they want. Targeting the localized search lets them find you!

First, pick your target and your key words.In this case the market is Campbell River and the key word is SEO. Limit the geographical area and use specific key words, to get maximum benefits. In the article Island Pizza Beats Pizza Hut in SEM I showed how a local business can out rank a major chain using these same techiques.

Second, make sure the geographical area you are targeting and your key words appear in the text. That sounds simple. But, large businesses with 'corprate websites' can't include all their location on a single page so they the visitor 'look up' the address. Unless they create a separate page for each location, this internal pages will not rank well on search engines. Surprisingly, some sites will only include the key search words and forget the geographical location.

The third, and fourth steps are a bit technical. Within the web page are two special tags. The first called the 'title' tag gives the title that appears in the blue bar at the top of the browser . The second, called the 'description meta tag', is the description shown in the SERP. Both these tags are used by the search engines to 'decide' what your page is all about. Your geographical location and key words MUST be in these tags.

In this example, I used <title>SEO Campbell River (Web Design and Online Marketing)<title> for the title tag and <meta name="description" content="SEO Campbell River is an article on optimizing a web page for a high listing on the search engine results page by localizing the search terms.> for the description meta tag.

Does this technique work? This page was published on Aug. 12, 2008. It takes about two weeks to start showing up in the search engine rankings. Try searching for "SEO Campbell River" to see the results.