Optimising Local Search For Your Website

The power of local search is such that no website should be without it. By ignoring the possibilities of allowing people to find you by location rather than simply through your business and associated keywords, you could be missing a very important trick.

Unless you're an offshore business, there is really no reason why you couldn't or shouldn't be benefiting from local search. Whilst it may seem like a major amount of work for a speculative gain, the truth is that you can achieve great results for what is a very simple process.

Unlike other areas of search engine optimisation, local search isn't bound by complexities. There's very little in the way of trial and error, plus onsite changes can often be kept to a minimum. The one visible alteration that may be required is simple text changes within your site's body copy. Occasional mentions of the service you offer adjacent to your location, be it a village, town, city, county or even country, will help your site get picked up by search engines for these specific terms.

For example if you're a London based antiques dealer you might want to include a general phrase like 'London antique store'. However, you might also want to be more specific, focussing on the immediate area that you're located in 'Greenwich antique store'. The decision on how focussed your search is should be largely dependent on the business that you have and personal preference.

A slightly more complex approach is to incorporate something called geotagging. This is an invisible piece of coding that sits within your website's Meta. Essentially it works by pinpointing your business using global coordinates and then allowing you to select a zone of influence, which is basically how specific you'd like to be about your locality.

The best thing about geotagging is that it can be used right throughout the site and adjusted as needed for different pages. So if you're got one business that has a number of outlets, you don't need to be confined to just promoting your head office as each page can have its own geographical identity. With coordinates and HTML coding involved, it isn't necessarily the easiest way of optimising your local search credentials, but it can be the most worthwhile.

Once you've completed all of your website changes, then you can look to explore a few offsite opportunities. Search engines are always a good place to start, particularly as it is their traffic that you're ultimately looking to tap into. Most of the major engines provide a local search directory, which will often appear at the head of the SERPs (search engine results pages) and include a map with plotting points for each business in the vicinity.

Whilst you can't simply muscle your way to the top of these, a good position within the local search box can result in improved visibility and subsequently increased site traffic. Gaining a leading position is achieved through conventional SEO, so the search engines assign a level of authority for your site based on their own algorithmic calculations.

Local business directories such as the Yellow Pages (Yelp) can help hone in that local search strength. You may also find industry specific ones that can also help improve your SEO, online visibility and local search credentials. If your site has a number of inbound links, these too can be optimised by simply using your local-business key terms also implemented within the onsite copy.

As with all website marketing, the more you can do, the finer the focus and the better the quality, the greater the end product you can achieve. Local search hasn't yet been adopted by everybody, but if you want to get your business noticed within a certain region, there really is no better investment in time.