When building a website to attract local business, one of the most important aspects of website construction is to specifically target local internet searches with both your on-site and off-site SEO efforts. It doesn’t help your business to target an unnecessarily broad keyword if you cannot offer services to the wide spectrum of consumers who will be clicking on your site.
While it would be great for a locally owned spa to rank on the front page of Google for the search term “Spa”, it is unlikely that ranking will be achieved without inputting a huge amount of SEO effort. If this spa were located in the Charlottesville, VA region it would be much easier to target a longer tail keyword such as “spa virginia”, “spa va”, or even “spa charlottesville.” Internet searchers are a wily bunch, and for the most part have figured out that if they are looking for a local business it is necessary to add their state or city (or both) to the search in question.
As an example, my company, SEO Charlottesville, is targeting businesses local to Charlottesville, VA for its marketing efforts. Looking at the page source you will see many of the SEO targeted keywords are region specific. When building a system of links back to your businesses home page, having those regional keywords included as part of your backlinking strategy will encourage the search engines to display your business listing over those of other local businesses when region-specific words are included in the search terms.