Optimizing for Local Search

From The Yaffe Center

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.