If You Don’t Optimise for Local Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later

Local searchers might not be the same volume of website traffic as ranking for big terms, but the users searching locally are using more specific search terms and tend to convert better as a result.

As Matt mentioned the other day, there is a lot of experimentation going on in the search engines for increasing relevance for local searchers. And local online advertising is predicted to grow at 13% per year which means that increasingly, users are turning to local options.

With the increasing use of mobile search (which uses GPS or antenna location) being visible is becoming ever more important, and it is essential that the search engines know where you are and where your customers are.

Here are some ways that you can attract this local traffic for an organic SEO campaign:

1. Make sure your physical address is on your website. If you have a local premises that you receive customers/clients at, you should use it prominently, perhaps in the footer of pages. Note that it is also now a legal requirement for your website to carry your registered address.
2. Use a Google Map to indicate your location, using the embedded iframe technique that Google launched last year. This is also a great feature for your customers trying to visit you!
3. Take advantage of the long tail by including an “areas covered”paragraph or page, where you list out the other local areas that are implied by where you are. This could be the local London Borough names, or sub-areas of your town, or even the surrounding towns and villages. But if you don’t mention the places, you are not going to appear!
4. Again, using those words, if you have a testimonials page, especially from consumers, it is easy to say the testimonial is from “Mrs Atkins, Portsmouth” and therefore increase local affinity. If you already have user generated content for reviews, this is a field you could consider adding to what you collect from the customer.

And just think of the one-upmanship you can have in your industry or Chamber of Commerce by having top rankings for all the local area searches.