SEO Blog

It seems slightly ridiculous to say it, but the vast majorities of stores and businesses have a certain catchment area. Yes, clients may also come from afar, but their core customer base is located within a certain proximity of their office, or at least one of their offices.

Local search targets this key demographic. Internet users searching for services within a certain county or city are looking for something specifically, something that you could ultimately help them with.

How many times when you use a search engine to find something other than a generally available consumable (DVDs, CDs and Games that can be found anywhere), have you also included your location? We do this when we want to find something within travelling distance. More often than not we’re in the mood to purchase from or at least contact the business in question. This is one of the key benefits of local search.

If a searcher is keen to find a business or service within their immediate surroundings, they are unlikely to be doing so purely for research. Therefore you have a far greater chance of converting these searches into customers.

Of course, when you do optimise for local search you discount the vast majority of the online competition. SERPs are intelligent enough to filter out links that are deemed inappropriate, so if somebody is looking for a printing company in Norwich, that’s what will be top of the heap. So if you are said printing company in Norwich, you’ve outranked your rivals and will be seen by anybody who is in your area looking for your printing services. There won’t be any national competition, nor will there be any from further afield.

Effectively you are stripping back your SEO efforts and targeting the most focussed area possible. The joy of local search optimisation is that it needn’t ruin your SEO efforts elsewhere and won’t interfere with your on page content. Any on page work should benefit your site and the users perception of it. So you might include your address as an embedded text code at the bottom of each page – yes, that counts towards your local optimisation!

You can do geo-tagging behind the scenes and get yourself signed up for local directories to help efforts. All of this work will help give your business a more physical presence online, making it easier to find and better positioned to gain from visitors in the immediate vicinity.

All very clever, but extremely simple with it. Rule out the national competition and get a jump start on all of your local rivals by optimising your website for local search.