Getting Local Business By Buying Local Geos

I have a problem.  Our business is located in Urbana but in reality our town is made up of two cities,  Champaign and Urbana.  Because the University of Illinois is half in Champaign and half in Urbana our town is essentially one.  That is except on Google.  On Google people often look for Champaign nursery or champaign mulch and due to the fact our nursery is in Urbana it is harder to hit the first page for Champaign targeted searches.

So I’ve decided to try and rank much better for Champaign targeted searches. My first move is to go back and use the word Champaign throughout my site.  Add Champaign to the meta tags and change the address to Champaign-Urbana.  My second move has been to buy Champaign geo names as they come available.  I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on domains as I knew I could spend $8 and buy targeted names but fortunately for me, two good names have come up over the last few months.  ChampaignIllinois.org and yesterday I purchased ChampaignIL.net,  both on the cheap.   Two names that I’m going to set up to help me rank better for the champaign products/services they are searching for.

My last move is to get some edu links for my company site.  I need a little more juice for my site and I could spend time and money and raise my pagerank but I have come up with a better way. I am no longer charging schools and the university for my speeches.  I am trading my services for links on their sites.  PR6-8 dot edu links.   It saves them money and it gets me a very valuable link.  A pretty good trade for both of us.

Over the past year I’ve been gathering all the parts but haven’t really had time to implement my plan.  I’m off next week so I plan on getting the websites up for the Champaign sites and I’ll be rewriting parts of the sites as well.  I’ll document the rankings at the beginning, my actions, and the results after 6 months and we’ll see what happens.