If you consider yourself a “local” business — i.e., your principal customer base is in a local area — then you have to work extra hard to promote yourself accordingly on your Web site. As I wrote on this blog previously, one of the things we want to do in our business is focus on providing services in our local area (Sonoma County, California). I regularly meet with businesspeople in Santa Rosa and Windsor, for example, so I need to make sure I’m communicating that effectively online.

To that end, we just put up a landing page showing how we can help local Sonoma County businesses build and maintain an effective online presence via their Web site. (Read this Wikipedia article to learn more about landing pages.) We’re eating our own dogfood, so to speak, by using a common SEO (Search Engine Optimization) technique to communicate clearly to a targeted audience exactly what we can do for them. Landing pages are not only helpful in getting additional traffic from search engines, but usually provide a better experience to potential customers than a generic home page that tries to be all things to all people. If you have a local business, or any business for that matter, I highly recommend considering how you can author landing pages that target specific demographics, locations, services, brands, or topics of interest relevant to your business, thus elevating your website in a wide variety of search results.

The landing page concept can be abused, however. One thing that really ticks me off is when I click on a link in Google that seems to be on a specific topic or for a local audience, and then the page ends up being a generic placeholder containing a bunch of targeted keywords. As a responsible Internet citizen, you should definitely make sure you are creating valuable content that will motivate site visitors and provide a superior experience.

There’s your SEO tip for the week. Check out our new landing page and let me know if you have any suggestions!