Internet Marketing Toronto
March 21st, 2008 by hbond{{chris}} We’re starting a small series of topics on how to rank well for terms in Toronto.
We’re doing this primarily because we live and work in Toronto. More importantly we love this city and we want to share our experience and expertise with local business who are attempting to get higher rankings and grow their Toronto businesses!
We won’t be focusing on any specific Internet marketing terms – rather we’re going to take a look at some broad strategies that you should follow in order to get your site ranking at the top of the Google SERPS.
It would be nice to make this a little interactive too – so if you have a particular term you want to try and rank for post a comment. We’ll do some research and get a specific on what you can do!
We don’t claim to know everything either and in the spirit of giving we don’t mind recieiving information too. So if you have something to add by all means post it in the comments!
Hi Chris,
Would it be fairly safe to assume that what we’re going to be talking about here would be transferrable to any other locality?
Hey Stu,
I’d say about 80% would be transferrable. The remaining 20% will be specifics about Toronto and how to make sure the search engines truly understand you’re a local website.
Good idea… I always feel that going “local” and trying to rank well for those types of keywords are always a much better idea than going after the big boys. “Toronto jewelers” for example will be much more targetted, less competitive, and more likely to produce a sale than say “buy jewelry” or some other generic keyword.
Aside from ranking well, it seems that local keywords would attract people intent on buying rather than just random surfers. If someone’s searching for “Toronto jewelers” chances are they’re looking to buy. If they’re just searching for “jewelry” they might just be surfing.
While I’m not in Toronto, I do spend a fair amount of time working through SERP and keyword issues. For example, when trying to optimize for US cities, should one use the state abbreviation or entire state name.
I have discovered that Google applies an abbreviation to the entire state name. For example, Reno NV Real Estate as a search term will pick up the word “nevada” in bold on the SERPs. As a result, I typically target the two letter abbreviation only. (also, I assume most people are lazy and will only do the two letters over the entire state name).
Not sure how this would apply to areas in Canada but hope this helps.
Hey Mitch!
Thanks for the comments! We’ve seen the same thing here recently too with terms such as Dental showing listings for Denistry and so on. The same applies to local provincial abbreviations.
The bottom line is it’s now about making sure that you’re page of content is well targetted to many similar terms – not just a few specific keywords.
I enjoyed reading your blog. Very informative hehe. Not bad.