Time to Get Local With Search
Most businesses are quite aware of the importance of local awareness in their offline advertising, and wouldn’t advertise their pizza restaurant in Dallas in a local newspaper in Seattle, or a law firm in Boston on a billboard in Los Angeles.
But when it comes their online presence, because there’s no concept of geography for a website, they waste site engine optimization time and pay-per-click dollars in targeting people who are too far away to ever become customers.
There’s a growing localization effect that has two major drivers:
- Search engines are providing higher quality local results than ever before by using the IP address of the requester (see the box at the end of the article to see how much geographic information you provided by visiting this page). Optimization is significantly easier if you focus on location, and you’re likely to receive more targeted traffic.
- Search is happening everywhere: with the prolific growth of smart phones, and the growing tendency of users to search for everything all the time, users are expecting higher quality results that target their needs in their current location.
This has a substantial impact on where you should place your efforts in promoting your business website. Where global SEO used to be mainly a combination of using authoritative inbound links and strong anchor text, local search brings in other factors that have an influence on your rankings.
The good news is that while global search has become highly competitive for placement, there are still major opportunities in local search, since so few business websites take advantage of all the signals that can boost their local results.
Local Search Signals
- Claim your local listing pages in Google Places, Yahoo! and Bing, and provide comprehensive listings beyond the basic contact details.
- Advertise your local phone number in preference to a toll-free number (the area code determines your geographic location, whereas a 1-800 number provides no information).
- Ensure you have a physical location in the city of search, and make sure you include the address using the <address> HTML tag in your page footers. Currently, there is greater weight given to listings that are closer to the center in major cities.
- Develop listings in local directories (such as Local.com) and encourage citations – these are third-party statements about your business.
- Encourage customer reviews on websites such as Yelp – the number and quality of these has a major impact on your Google Maps listing placement.
- Include your location in the meta title and descriptions of your pages (e.g. end with “| Brooklyn, NY”).
- Start adding geo-tagged photos to services such as Flickr and Picasa – these can be highly effective in boosting local search results.
- Include location in the anchor text for inbound links.
- Ensure your domain name’s contact details are located in the same city.
Taking action on these signals is not particularly difficult or time consuming, but can yield considerably more traffic from local searchers.
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