Are you aware that ‘nearly 40% of all search queries have some sort of local intent’? And most of the people (as much as 70%) Google or Yahoo before consulting their local classifieds or yellow pages. With this blog post I would like to throw light on some really useful tips on how to optimize your website copy for local search (Google and Yahoo maps to be precise) -
- Know your place
When I say ‘know your place’, I actually mean geography. You should know all the variations of names with which your work place is associated and use these names creatively in one form or the other in header or strong tags and at least once in title tags too. If you are selling pizzas in Denver, instead of writing just ‘yummy pizzas’ in h1 tag, you may want to use ‘the most yummy pizzas in Denver’, this might prove to be a longer tail, with higher conversion traffic. So make sure that you include all the landmarks and places of interest when you write your website copy. For geographical research Wikie can be surprisingly useful for you. - Play with categories
If you are running a restaurant, targeting broader keyword categories like restaurant and bar, it won’t be such a smart thing to do, instead – ‘Best ‘Mexican food’ restaurant in Denver’ is a longer tail with a broader category that is more likely to convert. You can have more pages on your website targeting keywords like ‘best ‘Chinese’ food at ’15th street’ instead of ‘best restaurant’. - Local Business Directories
This is extremely important for your local search, make sure that your website is present in the local directories like Google Local Business Center, BBC, Talking Phone book, SuperPages etc. If not all, at least Google Local Business Center. - Web Analytics
Use Web analytics to monitor your website and watch out closely for the keywords people are associating your website with and insert those bubbling keywords into your website copy.
You may also want to refer to this wonderful post on Google’s local search algorithm.
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