Local search, and what it means to you
If you run a small business, chances are you’re primarily a local business—you might do some sales on your Web site, but a lot of your sales come from word-of-mouth or walk-ins to your physical store.
Local businesses face special challenges when it comes to marketing in the search engines. After all, there are probably the “big guys” in your industry that dominate the search results for your market, and competing with them can be extraordinarily difficult.
Luckily, Google and other major search engines have your back—they make it easy to get on the map (literally and metaphorically!) and will even favor local results over “global” ones in some cases.
Let’s talk about how you take advantage of all this.
The single most important step: Listing your business
To begin with, you need to tell the search engines about your physical locations.
Unlike your normal Web site, the search engines won’t discover on their own that you have a physical location that they should pay attention to. By creating a local business listing, you can tell people searching on the Web about
- your location,
- your hours,
- your contact information,
- the services you offer, and
- the distinguishing features of you brand (logo, description, photos of your location, etc.).
To get started, you’ll need to create your (totally free) listing. I suggest doing so with both Google Places for Business and Bing Places for Business.
Make sure you take full advantage of your listing by filling out all the information you can. This allows the search engines to better tailor what queries your location turns up for, and it also allows them to give more information when you do turn up.
There may also be industry-specific search engines that are worth registering with (again, for free). The most popular of these is Yelp (for restaurants, shopping, and consumer-facing services like automotive or home care).
Finally, don’t overlook general listing services like yellow pages. You can find some of the most popular general directories like these on GetListed.org’s Best Citation Sources by City list.
Later: Improve your listing with reviews and photos
After you’re listed in the directories you’ve decided are most important, don’t let your listing just sit there. Ideally, every time you close a deal, you’ll ask your satisfied customer to leave you a review. If you do this in person, have an iPad handy and ask the person to write the review in the store! When it comes to the Internet, people are terribly forgetful, so the best way to ensure you don’t get an empty “yes” is to remove any possibility of missing the mark.
Likewise, remind your email lists and your Web site visitors to drop you a review from time to time.
Your customers (and you) can also supply photos to your listing. If you’re a restaurant, this is a no-brainer, but any photos you can add of inventory will also help you stand out from the crowd.
Target geo-specific keywords in everything you do
If your business sells primarily to your location, all your SEO efforts should be focused on that location. That is, don’t work hard to rank for “HVAC repair” (and thus try to compete with the whole world), but instead focus on “kansas city HVAC repair” or something similar. You can use Google’s Keyword Tool (requires a free AdWords account) to estimate how many people search for terms specific to your location and industry each month.
These keyword ideas can be used to target your SEO campaigns in the most profitable directions. If you have a plan for long tail SEO—and you really should!—you can also use these as the inspiration for your content creation plan. Similarly, if you’re using a keyword ideas tool like HitTail, you probably want to focus on the geo-specific suggestions you get there.
On-page SEO for local businesses
Finally, let’s talk about all the things you can do on your actual Web site to maximize your exposure.
Make sure your titles and descriptions include your city
By making your title tags geo-specific, you’ll both improve your standing in the search engines results page (SERP) for relevant keywords and increase the likelihood that someone will actually click your listing when it turns up. (This is because the city name will be in bold. For instance, see the image below of results for “kansas city hvac repair.”)
Similarly, if you’ve set custom meta descriptions for your pages (and again—you really should!), make sure you include information about the locations you service. A phone number can be great here as well, so that people can call you without even clicking through to your site. The search engines won’t always display this meta tag, but when they do, you should make it count. (To be effective, though, make sure it’s no more than 155 to 165 characters long.)
Make your contact info and location(s) easy to find
For the sake of usability, you should have a phone number visible all across the site. I really like it in the upper right—something big and bold that says “Call us now at (123) 456–7890!”
If you rely on a physical location to do business, make sure your address and ideally directions are easy to find as well. (This can often go in the footer, as long as it stands out there.)
Another alternative is to show a small, embedded Google Maps view of your location. This makes it super easy to get directions no matter where the person is coming from. To embed this, simply search for your location in Google Maps, then click the “link” button (pointed to by the orange arrow below), then copy and paste the HTML (pointed to by the blue arrow below) onto your page.
Help Google understand your data (and display it better to the world!)
Google (and plenty of other search engines) currently support a wide variety of so-called “structured data” (also known as “rich snippets”). This is data which has been marked up in a special way so that it is easily understandable by a computer.
I’ve discussed adding authorship markup and ratings/reviews before. Other structured data that Google currently supports are:
- People
- Products
- Businesses and organizations
- Recipes
- Events
- Music
You can bet that as time goes on, Google will use this data more and more to deliver richer results—at least for sites that take advantage of it!
To learn more about Google’s use of structured data, see their official page on it. If you want to get started, I recommend Schema.org’s guide. (Schema.org has been endorsed as the “official” and thus most future-proof markup system by all major search engines, so you shouldn’t bother with other forms of micro-data unless there’s something you really want that isn’t supported by Schema.)
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More resources
- “How to Use Schema Markup for Local SEO,” from Search Engine Journal. If you’re interested in getting started with structured data on your site, this is a good resource.
- “How Users Search For Local Businesses,” from Search Engine Land. This gives a little insight into how people (I hesitate to use the word “normal,” since these are people who use an SEO tool) use search engines when looking for local results. Note that they found that city name was much more important than zip code, street name, or neighborhood. (But exceptions could occur if your city is heavily segmented by neighborhood!)