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?

Today there are well over 10 billion unique searches done each month, and that’s just in the United States! Of those searches, 40% of queries have Local intent, 5% use the city and/or state name, 2% use informal terms, like neighborhoods, and 0.5% use zip codes.

On Yahoo alone, 100 Million unique visitors per month search with “local intent".[2] We can extrapolate that there are HALF A BILLION unique Local searches per month on Google, based on Yahoo’s ~15% market share (though we’ve not seen any “hard numbers” released by Google about its average Local Search volume). We’ve seen both Google and Yahoo make dramatic shifts in how they return results in 2008, and all the trends point to Local.

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

2. source: http://cf.us.biz.yahoo.com/e/100514/live10-q.html