Anyone have experience in local lead gen?

[ItsYoBuddy]

I was looking for some new wordpress themes for one of my sites and came across a nice dentist/doctor type of theme. I always wanted to get into local lead gen stuff. Has anyone here tried something like collecting leads for dentists and selling them locally?

I'm not a big SEO guy, so I would drive most of my traffic from adwords/bing or facebook. Looking at some of the threads here, it looks like EMD's don't matter anymore. But it can't hurt if I register a domain like www.TownNameDentist.com would it?

I know 1-800 Dentist is a HUGE player in the dentist field but I thought maybe I could collect leads and sell for less and see how that goes since I don't live in a big city. Obviously this is going to take some work. Plan on taking a loss for awhile because of the CPC of most keywords.

I don't plan on collecting much from the main site other then if people click on "appointments". But the site would just have all information regarding the local dentists in the area and everything regarding dentists. My plan was to collect about 5-10 leads or so and send them over to a local dentist for free. If they like them then hopefully they want more, if not then move to the next one. I know it won't be easy, but I like to stick to projects for a long time before abandoning it after a couple months.

I plan on trying this and learning from it but people with experience with this, am I thinking this wrong?

 

[jryan54]

No thats pretty much the gig...but still do consider organically ranking the various pages because much of local seo scene is bloody easy to rank for. I've seen many niches over here in NZ that a few hundred spammy social bookmarks would just about rank you for. Local SEO doesnt have the same competition as Global phrases so do consider it as compared to PPC.

 

[friedcalamad]

Biggest thing: make sure the traffic is there.

Targeting local means lower numbers & you have to be careful. If you go for to small niche, it could be a waste of time so make sure you have enough traffic to produce a sizable amount of leads. At the same time, remember that local business keywords have higher conversions.