Has your SEO marketing lost its way? Did you work on your SEO for your site to drive in new business, but now you are getting clicks from all over the world when you’re just a small business centered in one city?  The latest trend in SEO is to increase the focus on the local market. While getting clicks is important, what is more important is driving actual business to you and if you are looking for local customers, tweaking your SEO marketing in a few powerful ways will help increase your business without breaking the bank.

Social networking sites really help you focus your market. By adding a social networking site to your methods of generating business you are doing yourself a SEO favor in a number of ways. First of all, it is a great place to simply advertise. While social networking sites are international, it is very easy to nail down where any individual person lives, including you and your corner of the social networking site. Focused, local SEO content on your social networking site will be viewed by many and seen as useful content by Google’s automated ranking system. The added benefit is you can put links to your web site in your social networking site. The ranking systems like seeing links to your site and give it more relevance when it sees these outside links.

As the trends to increase SEO for local markets show, picking proper keywords is getting better but still needs improvement. The easiest way to tweak your keywords is to add some part of your local market to the keywords. Rather than using “widgets” as the keyword, focus on the location. “Los Angeles widgets” or “California widgets” are more powerful and focused SEO terms. If you are paying for traffic, these keywords likely cost less too!

The automated ranking systems absolutely love blogs as you are most likely aware. If you do not have a blog, add one! They are easy to setup and update and are one of the most powerful SEO tools available. If you do have one, keep the content local. Rather than just writing about your new widgets, add content to your blog about local businesses and other locale focused content. Even if it is a personal blog, you will generate more local traffic that will then know about your site.

Adding video content is one of the latest ways to get extra SEO hits. If you have a fun and focused 15 second advertisement, adding it to video hosting sites such as YouTube builds your web presence. By having focused search terms in your web video, as well as a link to your web site either embedded in the video or as part of the description, you will be setting up another place where people can see you as well as the automated ranking systems.