Optimizing for Local Search

From The Yaffe Center

Revision as of 23:47, 3 January 2011

What Is Local Search—and Why Is It Important?

When a person is looking for a local business, product, or service, just where do they look? Well, many people continue to use the major search engines for their local searches. That’s a challenge to Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft—how do they determine whether someone is looking for local sites, and then how do they serve up locally relevant results to those searchers?

Localized Search and Mapping Sites

Even better, search engines all offer localized search services. These services are designed to steer users to nearby businesses that offer what users are looking for.

The search results listings for most of these local sites typically include only a business name, address, and phone number, and perhaps a link to that business’s website. Some search results listings also include links to reviews of that business.

For example, originally called Google Local, the local service is now part of Google Maps (http://maps.google.com), shown in following Figure1. Users enter a location into Google Maps and can then search for businesses within that location.

Figure 1. Local search results from Google Maps.

Where Should marketer Submit web site for Local Search?

The point is, people looking for local businesses, products, and services will attempt to conduct some sort of local search, whether that’s at Google or a more specialized site. They’re looking for something down the road, not across the country, and they want their queries to deliver local results.

For that reason, if web marketer is a local business trying to attract local customers, he needs to let the search engines know that. Optimizing for local search requires putting information onto web site that identifies marketer's locality and desire for local customers

Equally important, when web marketer’re optimizing for local search, he need to submit his site to more and different sites than normally do. Yes, Google and Live Search and Yahoo! are still of the utmost importance, but now you have to consider a handful of local search engines and directories as well.

Table 1.1. Local Search Directories <tb> <tr> Local Directory</tr><tr> Home Page URL</tr><tr> How to Submit Your Site</tr> AskCity http://city.ask.com Send e-mail to askcitybusiness@help.ask.com with the subject line “Ask City Feedback—Business.” Include the following information in your e-mail: business name, address, phone number, business category, website URL, and e-mail contact address. Dex www.dexknows.com Submit at www.advertisewithdex.com. Google Maps http://maps.google.com Submit at www.google.com/local/add/. Local.com www.local.com Submit at advertise.local.com. Superpages www.superpages.com Submit at advertising.superpages.com. TrueLocal www.truelocal.com Submit at www.truelocal.com/BusinessSuggest.aspx. Windows Live Search Maps http://maps.live.com Listings provided by Superpages; submit at advertising.superpages.com. Yahoo! Local http://local.yahoo.com Submit at listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/. YellowPages.com www.yellowpages.com Submit at http://store.yellowpages.com/post/. </tb>