How to Improve Search Traffic Locally
Whilst we all want to get as many people viewing our site as possible, occasionally a little added refinement is necessary. If you’ve got a store in Leeds but are getting the bulk of your traffic from oversees, the likelihood of gaining any meaningful custom through your website is significantly reduced.
Local search is an optimisation technique that has been developed to give a geographical focus to a site. Whilst search engines are incredibly intelligent, they still need to be given an indication of your location if they are to start ranking you for searches in that area.
The process of optimising a website for local search is basically straightforward. It is in effect a more specific version of your usual SEO techniques, incorporating link building, site submission, keywords and Meta. Rather than trying to broadly define the services or products that you offer, you instead need to show where in the world you’re based.
As alluded to earlier in the post, the major advantage of optimising your site in this way is that people who are searching for services in their immediate surroundings are more likely to see you first. For example, if you searched for ‘wine merchants’ you’d get a lot of results from websites all over the country – maybe even the world. However, if you narrowed that search to ‘wine merchants Hampshire’ suddenly you remove the national competition and are left with only those within your immediate vicinity.
Whilst your search audience is going to be significantly reduced for these terms, it will also be far more targeted; which means that you will be seen by those who are actually interested in what you have to offer. Plus, you needn’t worry about jeopardising all of your wider search terms. Local search is very much an additional optimisation technique and will only add to your site, not detract from the work that you may have done previously.
Including your address within the main structure of the site is a good start. But of course you will need to do far more work than that if you are going to dominate the rankings within your surrounding area. Signing up for recognised local directories and for Google maps is a great way to get links coming into the site that have been optimised to target your locality in deference to or in addition to your current keyword linking structure.
References can also be made within your website’s content, including H1 tags if they are relevant. Of course you don’t want to go overboard, as with SEO, this will only end up in something that is unreadable and largely unusable. Geotagging will help refine your location without affecting on page copy. This simply works by introducing coordinates into the site’s Meta, which allows search engine spiders to see it bit nobody else.
Don’t ignore the potential of local search, get seen by the people in your immediate vicinity and allow your site to reap the rewards.
