Should my business use SEO?

[676]

I am the owner of a restaurant and my business is just local. Should I use SEO? Is there any benefit for me to do so?

[simpleonline12]

Benefit = Traffic...traffic....traffic.....

The web is growing like wildfire and I always teach my students to use every angle to drive more traffic to their sites.

I did local restaurant in my area a while back and we were targetting a large variety of people to the website which in turn drove the actual people to the brick and mortar location as well.

Not to get to deep into this because i'm tight on time but we designed the local restaurant's website and after doing some radius research we found that a lot of people were searching for terms like Houston hotels, rental cars Houston, etc so we used that to our advantage.

People searching for those type terms are normally coming in from out of town and with that they have no idea (we hoped) where to eat so.....

We designed 2 additional quick free websites using Weebly the first one was a review type site for the Houston Hotels and in that freebie site I think we created 3 pages of prices, reviews, etc. I think it took us about 3 hours of labor.

So you thinking what the heck does that have to do with my restaurant? Those folks have to eat right?

We ranked that puppy #1 in google for it's search term and in the only ad section we created a custom coupon food ad for their restaurant along with entire page dedicated to the restaurant.

We repeated the same process with the car rentals Houston and you wouldn't believe the amount of calls they got for to go orders and people coming in from those two ads alone.

We also got them #1 for Houston restaurants in Google.

I just did a quick search to see if they were still in there but it fell off....they went out of biz about 1 year ago something to do with the ownwers going different ways or something....they called me to tell me to take the site down.

But any who you get the drift.....think big picture and many avenues of people searching the web...

[hessal54]

Just because you are a local business, you still need to do SEO. The reason being there are always vacationers coming into your area and now days they get on the internet to find out what is available in the area they will be visiting. With the internet vacationers can have the whole vacation planned before they get there. So it would not hurt to do SEO

[Vicarius]

Few things grate on me more than hearing my fellow SEOs talk about how easy local SEO is. There’s less competition! The competition isn’t SEO savvy! Keyword choices are limited! It’s a piece of cake, they say. That’s about as accurate as me saying that traditional SEO is a piece of cake. Sweeping generalizations are often wrong, and below I’ll show why local SEO isn’t as easy as many think it is.

[LocalGuru]

Yes, Local SEO. You'll want to verify your business on all the major local search engines. The main players, in addition to Google, are Yahoo! Local, Bing Local, Merchant Circle, Insider Pages, CitySearch, Yelp, SuperPages, Local.com, and Hot Frog. Make sure you fill out all the necessary info, add your logo and photos and use optimized keywords.

Plus, being a restaurant you'll want to go to zagat.com and tripadvisor and sign up as well. You might also look into offering a coupon on restaurants.com or groupon to get the word out.

You'll also want to go to Localeze.com and post your business info because they're a major data aggregator and distribute your info for free.

Remember to ask customers for reviews as well. This can be done while making your dinner rounds. Simple say, we'd appreciate your input on Google. Then tell them to search for your business name in google maps and write a review. If you feel more comfortable sending them to another site that's fine as well; tripadvisor, and insiderpages are both heavily indexed by Google, so reviews at both of those sites will show in a google search.

I've posted links below that take you directly to the setup pages of the resources listed above.

Best of Luck!

http://www.google.com/local/add/lookup?w...n-US&gl=US
http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php
https://ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx
http://www.merchantcircle.com/signup/
http://www.insiderpages.com/advertiser/find_business
https://myaccount.citygridmedia.com/self...ution=e1s1
https://biz.yelp.com/signup
http://www.supermedia.com/business-listings
https://advertise.local.com/
https://webapp.localeze.com/extranet/createaccount.aspx