Easy tips to top listings on local search
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Local search is the fastest growing form of online activity, according to Comscore, and as consumers will soon conduct two billion local searches each month, businesses should take action to manage their online local listings. Local search has revolutionised how quickly and easily customers can find local business information. In an instant you can have a list of every Indian restaurant in a 10-mile vicinity and directions on how to get there.
A variety of search engines are currently providing local search, including efforts backed by the largest search engines and new start-ups. Some of these efforts are further targeted to specific vertical segments, and several are tied into mapping products. A few of them are local.yahoo.com, local.aol.com, maps.live.com, yell.com and of course maps.google.com
The local search algorithm is based on relevance. This relevance depends upon the trust the search engines have in the information they have about your business. In most cases, the merchant is considered to be the most trusted source of data about their own business. Verifying ownership of your profile online is the most important factor for ranking well on local search engines. Let's look at what could be the most important factors for building trust as well as optimizing them on the best search engines:
Domain Research
This is a crucial part of building any successful website. Choose your domain name in such a way that the name of the city or state that you are looking to target is included in the domain name
Many SEO experts debate if hosting a website locally help in SEO. It is generally recommended that you host your website with the local hosting provider where you look to target your business. Technically the website IP address would be assigned as per your region of hosting, so hosting the website in the location is likely help in optimizing with some engines.
Optimization of every page of the website can make optimization easy in search engines. Try to have the physical address and contact information on the pages you are optimizing for local search (ideally it's the home page of your website)
While creating the pages in your website - for dynamic websites make sure that you are using .htaccess to rewrite the URL of every file. Try your best to put the files in the relevant folder and rename to folder as the city name that you would like to target.
This is one of the important factors in the optimization of a website in search engines. Submitting your site in the relevant category within the relevant region. There are various directories including Dmoz and the Yahoo directory.
Include your local address in every page as far as possible. Either at the bottom of the page or on the left hand strip. Make sure that you also include your local phone number for that respective address.
Ask your customers to provide the link to your site from a relevant page. A relevant page could be either a page of your customer that talks about the city that you would like to advertise for, or a product relevant to yours. Get good reviews from your clients along with a good link to your site.
Plan a strategy to build your local PR. This will help you to build good word-of-mouth publicity as well as good branding for your site.
You can submit your site to all the search providers like maps.google.com, local.yahoo.com, local.aol.com, maps.live.com and yell.com for UK. You can submit all these sites for free. You can also do a bulk upload in Google if your company has multiple locations all around the world.
Google Maps Local Business listing allows you to add coupons to print out and bring to your shop. Yahoo has a paid search option where you can get additional features like Company logo and tag line detail business description, guaranteed placement, and broader exposure about your business, etc.
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