Local Search for Dummies
Author: Eric Katherman
Level: Beginner
Optimizing for search engines is really competitive. If you're a small business that sells products or services in a specific area, you won't have much of chance competing with the larger national websites for your search terms.
Fortunately, you can target your search engine campaign for LOCAL searches.
How does it work? When your customers search for local businesses, they likely will be adding a city and sometimes a state to their search terms. Even if they don't add a city or state, Google uses proximity detection and often will provide you with local results. You can see an example of this by just searching for restaurants in Google.
Not only does this enable the little sites to be more completive, this traffic is more TARGETED. If you can only service a local area, getting visitors to your site from outside that area has little chance of bearing fruit.
So how do you get your site optimized for local search? Fortunately there are some very simple things that you can do that will help your
local search engine results. Note: some of these items may need to be done by your website developer.
Get a Google Local Profile
This is a free, simple, and important step in the local optimization process. You need a to create a free account in order to sign into the Google Local Business Center. You can find the link to the website here.
Once there, you will need to click the "Put your business on Google Maps" link in the left column. Then, follow the directions for adding a new business listing. Having this profile will not only allow you to control what users see on the Google maps balloon, but it reinforces your business location. It also provides a way for your customers to
provide feedback through the built-in "user review" system.
Submit to local directories
There are a number of website directories where you can submit your site. Some of them are free, some are not, and some are not going to be helpful to your localized search results. A good measure is to start small, don't try adding a profile on every single directory website that you can find. It is more helpful to try one or two and then monitor
your business's location in the results for changes.
The websites below are free and geared toward the local businesses.
MoJo Pages - www.mojopages.com
City Squares - www.citysquares.com
City Search - www.citysearch.com
Yelp - www.yelp.com
Local.com - www.local.com
You should also make sure your information is updated in the more "official" directories, like InfoUSA.
http://list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm
The more directories you can land on the better. You'll want to make sure your listing and contact info is consistent with every listing.
Titles & Content
It is also important that your pages content and titles reflect your local keywords as well. This means that for a web page title for an "About Us" page, it shouldn't look like this:
Acme Products - About Us
But should include local terms, like this:
Acme Products is a Widget Delivery company serving Lancaster, PA since 1956
In addition, a sentence on your site might look like this:
"Acme Products has been reliably delivering widgets to customers in the Lancaster, PA, and surrounding areas since 1956."
Search engines look at the title and content to obtain information about your page. When your title has location information that matches what is found on the page itself, that strengthens your local credentials.
It is important to not overdo it. The title and copy should read normally to humans. One of the biggest practices in SEO is writing content that makes sense to readers. The basis for this is: if people can read and understand it, search engines can too.
Address and Phone Number
Another good practice is adding your contact information. Your full address and phone number should be in the footer of every page. Even if you primarily use a toll free (1-800) number, you should still include your local phone number with the local area code.
In some cases it might make sense to add a small "Contact Us" section to a side menu or column. This is generally more visible to your users and actually has a slightly better value from an optimization standpoint.
Learn More
If you are a SiteStrux customer or would like to learn how SiteStrux can help you with your local search engine optimization & marketing, click here. We offer many different SEO and online marketing packages to fit your goals and budget.
Click here to contact us about Search Engine Optimization