What Should be Your Search Strategy For Local Businesses

During the last years, mostly because of the on-going growth in mobile search, local search volumes have shown a tremendous increase. More specifically:

• Over 50% of mobile queries have local orientation.
• More than 20% of desktop queries include local search volumes. From these queries
• 5 % use the state name or the city
• 2% use informal terms, like neighborhoods
• 0.5% use area codes

Because of this shift a comprehensive local search strategy is essential for all businesses with a physical location. But how can inbound marketers design an effective local search strategy?

Local Search Strategy

The search engines are often smart enough to identify and deliver local search results, even if those in search don’t give strong clues that they are looking for a local business. But this is not always true. Websites will rank better in web search results for location-oriented keywords if the website reinforces its geographical location in the following search friendly ways:

• Web page optimization
• Structured data
• Local listing
• Social media profiles

Web page optimization

In order to optimize your website for local searches, marketers have to make sure that their business location is included in the following on page elements:

• Title tags

• Meta description

• Headings

• The page itself

Tips: Include your business address and local phone in as many pages as you can. This is easy to accomplish by using text footer. By doing this you send search engines a strong message about your location or you could also use a special address format called hcard.

Structured data

By implementing structured data  apart from increasing your websites CTR you help search engines understand the location of a business and provide its address as a rich snippet in search results.

Tips:  You can use Schema.org in order to design your structured data.  Alternatively you can make use of data highlighter which can be found in your webmasters tool.

Local listing

Local listing on search engines can also derive from separate indexes other than the main web search results. Make sure that you index your website in the most important search engines.
On Google, these are called google places businesses, on Bing they are called Bing places for business whereas on Yahoo they are called yahoo Local Listing.

Tips: Make use of testimonials and reviews. More than 50 % of consumers said that positive online reviews, make them want to use a local business.

Don’t shy away from leveraging your social media presence to promote your local reviews. By doing this not only you increase your CTR but you also establish a wider net of social proof.

Social media profiles

Most of online marketers argue about social signals and whether or not they play an important role on a website’s ranking. Even if they don’t, local businesses should be optimized in order to send social signal in search engines regarding their location.

Tips: Make use of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare. Optimize them for local searches by including business location within their descriptions.

To sum up, it is clear that it is important for local businesses to begin and maintain a local search strategy.
So, if you have a local business follow these steps to ensure that your business is ready for local SEO and gain a competitive advantage against other local businesses in your geographical area.

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