How Important is Local Search Visibility?
The search engines’ results pages have gradually seen local elements gaining additional focus. You’ll find maps with businesses in your vicinity at the top of Google even for generic searches. As far as services are concerned, search engines believe that local is better.
They’re not wrong either. If I’m looking for a bakery, I don’t want to have results coming back from other counties or countries either. The likelihood is that you will want to find one within your vicinity so you can easily visit it or contact them regarding an order.
Reaching a Highly Targeted Local Audience
As you may not always use a local term like ‘Southampton’ or ‘Hampshire’ in your search query, this kind of automated geographical result is valuable. Unfortunately if you’re not appearing though, you stand to lose a good deal of search visibility.
Whilst SEO is all about gaining organic rankings, other elements of SERPs where advantages can be gained aren’t overlooked. When it comes to getting seen on Google maps you don’t even necessarily need a website. Okay, so that’s probably more concerning than it is positive, but Google look to reward reputation more than perhaps strength.
The search engines glean information from users all the time to work out their location and search habits. They encourage you to enter details at every opportunity to develop this local search functionality. But they also draw on information from authority sites and your own content in order to rank you properly.
If somebody reviews you on Qype, Yelp, Trip Advisor (travel only) or any other leading review site then this just feeds through more information. The more they can establish about your worthiness, the better it is.
Build Your Reputation and Boost Visibility
So having a website certainly will be a huge advantage in this case. Here you can develop content that cements your location and will corroborate the information Google holds. The more you are able to do this, for example by signing up to other local directories and specialist industry, the greater your chances of getting seen in the search map.
Encourage visitors to leave reviews wherever possible. If somebody has really enjoyed your services they will often do so naturally, but often a little reminder won’t go amiss.
Don’t forget about your organic listings though either. Whilst you want to get seen within the map, natural search results are still hugely important. To achieve this you just need to make sure that you use a few local terms throughout your site.
Avoid the temptation to go overboard. Spam is still treated with disdain by Google, so whether that’s repetition of a keyword or a particular place, you are still unlikely to get any benefit.
Do a little research and find out what local terms people are searching for and go for these. In all likelihood the competition levels will be reasonably low, so your chances of getting a good ranking will be much better – although that’s not an excuse to take it for granted of course
