Kelowna Internet Marketing Strategy

Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada is one of the leading destinations in the country, both for holidays and to reside. Holiday traffic in the summer season due to the big beautiful lakes- Okanagan, Skaha and Kalamalka- and skiing at the nearby Big White and Silver Star ski hills, provide the year round inhabitants with retailing, cusine and other benefits usually seen only in much larger centers. It is also a destination for web-based small business owners who can do the job anywhere. Given its size and character, Kelowna is an excellent location to market to online as well. Kelowna area residents are very web savvy and spend a lot of time online. Local community websites have a solid user base and the overall web traffic makes local internet marketing a viable option for many businesses, though not all capitalize on the possiblities.


The starting point for marketing in a city like Kelowna is to build a decent website that caters to the local market. Generally speaking, this means identifying the best keywords from prior SEO and PPC efforts, and adding a local designation such as the name of the community, the name of the region, or the name of the neighborhood the business is located in. Very simply, you are adding a geographic modifier to the keywords that you would otherwise use in your pay per click or search engine optimization. If I was a car dealer in Kelowna and my best keywords were "new cars" or "new pickups" I would simply add my location to those keywords and have new keywords on the new pages optimized for "Kelowna new cars" or "new cars Kelowna."

Short online movies can also give local advertising efforts a real boost, for very minimum cost. This video can be as simple as a screenshot of your locally optimized webpage with a voice-over describing the product or services offered. Upload the video to YouTube and other video sharing sites using the appropriate keywords in the description, in this case "Kelowna new cars."
Videos rank very well for local searches and can displace competing business sites, giving the informed small business marketer several places on the first page of the search engine results.


Finally, adding a PPC or pay per click search advertising advertising campaign can be very valuable for local advertising and marketing. Simply start an Adwords campaign using those locally modified keywords pointing to that locally optimized landing page. Your quality score will be very high, your costs very low, and you almost certainly will be on the first page for cents per click. It is typical to have two or more of the 10 organic results as well as 1 of the best PPC results on the first page using this method!

Big urban markets are becoming very competitive online, though good web marketers can still get great results. However, in smaller markets like the one in the Okanagan Valley communitiies like Kelowna, the compeitition online for some businesses is almost non-existent and there are still many niches that are wide open for the taking online.

So, what's the applicaton? Get a good website, talk to an internet marketer (which is usually distinct from a web designer) and go after your local market!

Kelowna Internet Marketing Strategies