Local Search Pays Off: Help You Local Business Flourish Online |
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In today’s highly competitive business world, Local search is the place
where small businesses can definitely gain an advantage over big
corporations and chains. Ranking well in Local search will open the
doors to prospects located within the area your business operates and
thus will significantly fuel the growth of your local business. Realizing
this, more and more small business owners are becoming actively
involved in it.
Local search is any search made with the
intention of finding information, product or service in a specific
geographic location/area. It is estimated that 30 to 40 percent of
searches are local in nature. On top of it, search engines are
increasingly serving local results for search queries with implicit
local intent.
A survey shows that 90% of online commercial
searches results in local offline purchases, and 61% of all local
searches ends up in a transaction. In other words, unlike general web
searchers who in the most cases are looking for pre-purchase
information, people looking for local businesses are much closer to a
buying decision. They are prepared to buy, and you need to ensure that
they will make the purchase from your online store. To put it in
perspective, there is a huge opportunity for small businesses to
attract local clientele at little or no cost.
In order to help
your local business flourish online, you can take a few steps that will
positively affect your local search rankings:
Localize Your Site Content
Having
a well-optimized web site can significantly influence your local search
rankings for a particular keyword. The on-page factors that you fully
control, such as putting your city/state in the title tags of your web
site and placing your address and phone number with area code in text
format on your pages, are often neglected by small business owners.
Your contact information is important for search engines and your
customers alike who would like to know it, so you can’t afford missing it.
There are two key places where you could mention your location:
About Us page: Usually, an About us page presents the company and its core activities.
In addition, it would be great to tell your prospects where you’re
located. Users will be looking for that kind of information, and if
they find it, they will trust your company more. It will also act as a
good citation for the search engines.
Contact page: If,
for whatever reason, you don’t list it on your "About Us" page, you
should set up a comprehensible “Contact Us” page displaying your
location, a map, the cities you serve, hours, email address, fax
number, phone number, and any other information associated with your
location.
Claim Your Business Listing on Google, Yahoo, and MSN
The
next step to take is to get your business listed for local searches on
Google, Yahoo and MSN. You could add your business listing for free to
all three major search engines, and the registration process is fairly
simple.
Make sure your local business listings on Google local, Yahoo local, and MSN local are complete, accurate, and up to date.
One
of the most important stages in the registration process is the choice
of categories. Use the keywords, you have already chosen and optimized
your site for, as your categories. Having a particular keyword in your
category or in your business title will positively affect your rankings
for that keyword. If you have discovered that your local customers are
using a particular search term to find your listing, don't hesitate to
create a new category. You can choose multiple categories, but use them
wisely as you might run the risk of diluting the focus of your keywords.
You
should also pay special attention to the description of your company.
Do not only copy and paste the content from your website or About Us
page. Think of what your local customers are looking for when they
searches for local keywords, and try to give them what they want to
find.
Get Listed in Local Search Engines and Business Directories
You
may already be aware that no all searchers use the three major search
engines when it comes to local search. Many users flock to local search
engines and business directories to find information related to a
specific area.
There are a huge amount of websites and
directories that provide local business information, such as Internet
yellow pages and sites like Local.com, Yelp, CitySearch, Kudzu,
InsiderPages, TouchLocal.com, WeLoveLocal.com, AllPages, GetListed.org, and
Localeze. All they give businesses the opportunity to create accurate
listings in their indexes.
It can be quite a tedious task since it
takes a lot of time, effort and energy but you will have to entirely
fill out your listing on each site. Your only purpose is to have full
and accurate information about your company on as many places as
possible. Both Google and Yahoo use these directories as citations to
shape their own local results. So, take the time to create your
listings precisely.
It would be better to use the same
information across all of these web sites which will greatly reduce the
confusion in the search engines. This information should also be
relevant to what the search engines see on your web pages.
Get Good Reviews
Reviews
are reasonably important to ranking in the local search space.
Presently, it seems the number of reviews is more influential than
whether they are positive or negative ones.
However, from customers’
perspective, reviews, ratings, and comments are a decisive factor in
picking out who to do business with. So reviews are of great importance
to your potential customers. For that reason, ever encourage loyal
customers to spread the word about your products and services online.
Being
small doesn’t mean that you can not compete successfully with the
bigger players. You just need to be smarter and to do all the little
things that will make the difference. Since local business listings
have the power to drive a substantial amount of targeted traffic to
your small business store, you will have to accomplish all of the steps
needed to rank well in Google Maps, Yahoo Local and MSN Local.
Copyright © 2023 DevStart, Inc. Permission is required to use the material on this page.
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