Local SEO allows hometown service providers to gain customers within their operating areas, reports GeotargetLocal.com

Grand Rapids, MI -- (ReleaseWire) -- 08/04/2014 --Search engine optimization, or SEO, has been around almost as long as search engines themselves. This is because a top listing in a search engine can bring tens of thousands of dollars' worth of new business or even more. As the Internet has grown, however, it has become increasingly hard to get seen at all, let alone get top ranks. Fortunately, for many companies, there is no need to compete against an entire nation or even the world for top ranks under the most important search terms. Instead, gaining high ranks for local areas is both easier and better.

"It's impossible to overstate the importance of local SEO for people like doctors, plumbers, and appliance repair technicians. When people look for these or similar professionals, they don't want to be told about one that's halfway across the country. Distant providers are simply too far away to be relevant. To avoid getting these irrelevant listings, searchers will usually add the name of a town or county to their queries. This is where local SEO comes in. It allows companies to compete not on the national scale, but on the scale that only includes the searchers who are actually likely to become customers," explained Tim Walker of Geotarget Local, an SEO firm specializing in helping businesses attain rankings for their local areas.

At Geotarget Local's site, found at http://geotargetlocal.com, it's clear that there's more to local SEO than just sticking a town name at the end of every page title. The site talks about link quality, on-page SEO, pages specifically made to target localities around the client's location, and more. It even mentions the fact that some optimization companies use sub-par linking methods in their efforts, and offers a service to help clean these up to remove potential penalties.

"These things are just the start of local SEO efforts," Walker said. "Each element on and off of the website can affect rankings. On site, the addition or removal of images, text, and videos can have a tremendous effect. The days when all it took to rank under a term was to mention it over and over again are gone. Now, both too few and too many mentions can cause lost rank. Off-site, link text and link sources are both essential. Our services make sure to cover both aspects so that nothing is left wanting for a client's ranking efforts."

About Geotarget Local
Geotarget Local is an SEO firm specializing in helping locally-focused companies rank highly under the keywords that are the most likely to bring them actual customers. It offers everything from keyword research to link cleaning in order to set local companies on the right track for gaining high visibility in the search engines while removing any factors that may be holding their sites back.