22
Aug
2010
Local SEO – Opportunities For Small Businesses
What do we mean by ‘local SEO’? This basically means that you target a website through Search Optimization to attract local traffic, whether that local traffic means local to a specific town, county, state or country.
Local SEO actually means different things in different contexts. In a lot of ways, people who live in countries outside the USA is fortunate where Search Engine Optimization is concerned. Google, and to a lesser extent, Bing, offers very strong geographically based searches. Users in other countries are often automatically directed to their local version of Google and their local Google gives preference to local sites.
How does Google decide whether a website is a ‘local’ site? Top Level Domain extensions (for example, .co.za for South Africa, .co.uk for the UK) as well as IP addresses that are located in a specific country give Google the ‘message’ that the website is a local one and these websites will get preference in the local versions of the search engine, often pushing very popular international sites lower down in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).
The advantages of being able to compete on a local search engine level, as opposed to in the International domain are legio.
Examples of these advantages are:
- The level of competition in the local search engine results are often orders of magnitude less than in the International Arena. It is also possible using the local version of Google for example, to restrict the result set to show only pages of the specific country. Once you do that you see that even very competitive terms such as car insurance become terms that can easily be competed against since the local competition is just not as huge as competing against the whole of the .com community.
- It is possible to get a much higher click through rate to a site since you can tailor the content on the site to cater for the specific country’s products and services.
- It is possible to set up multiple sites focusing on various country level domain extensions and target a specific local market that way, instead of trying to create one site to compete as a global international site in these markets.
On the other hand, website owners and search engine optimization experts might find it difficult to optimize websites for local search in the USA, where .com domain extensions are used to indicate any type of commercial site and are often seen as an internationally focused websites. The competition (in other words, the number of other websites that you are competing against in the Google Search Engine Results Pages), is huge, especially in competitive markets such as insurance, loans etc.
If you are located in the USA you need to utilize Google’s search tool for Keywords (the adwords keywords sandbox tool) or other search tools to see whether you can find any popular search terms that are focused on your specific neck of the woods and then optimize your site and your links for those.
This might include looking for search terms that include your local town, your county or state and then optimise your site for that. You will also have to make sure that your site contains enough ‘local’ content such as address and contact details particular to your specific area so that your site will be picked up easily when people search for specific products and services in your area.
A local business listing in Google will also definitely help!
If you are searching Internet for information about the topic of website traffic, then please go to the site that is mentioned right in this line.
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