SEO Blog

Local search is a division of SEO that is perhaps more underused than most. As its title suggests, local search simply refers to the optimisation of a site for terms related to its geographical location. So why is this helpful?

Well, how many times have you performed a search for a business or product that has included a location? Chances are that you’ve used a search engine at some point to do this; local search is a way of ensuring that people find you first when they do this.

As with all things in SEO it is remarkably simple, when you know how. All you need to do is tell the search engine crawlers where you’re located. This can be done in a number of ways.

Firstly there is your on page copy. By including your address within the mainframe of the site and having it display on each page you immediately have a point of reference for the search engine. You can further optimise this by including keywords relating to your locality within the main body text itself as well as Headers (H1 or H2). Although in doing so, be sure that you aren’t ruining the flow of the copy, this could ultimately have a detrimental effect on a visitor’ perception.

Next get yourself signed up to some business and local directories. Not only will these give you a great link back, supporting your general SEO work, it will also help optimise your website within your area. As with many things, this has many benefits and very few drawbacks, so it’s a quick and affordable way of getting your website marketed.

Then, getting a little more technical, you might also want to consider geotagging. Whilst that probably sounds like a geologists pet project, geotagging is in fact the perfect way to pinpoint your exact location to Google. Essentially all you need to do is implement your businesses global positioning coordinates within a specially formatted Meta area of your site, and the spiders will pick this up.

The ingenious thing is that you can either have the same data on each page or differ it where needed. Therefore, if your business has many physical sites you can alter the geotagging coordinates to reflect each individual one for their specific pages. It’s a great way to get noticed without disrupting your on page content.

So there you have it, local search is just one of a whole host of techniques that come under the broad SEO umbrella. Like most others it can take time for changes to happen, but if you want your business to start being shown within the top few positions on the search engines within your neighbourhood, it is hugely important that this work is implemented.