If you are thinking about getting your website ranked for local keywords, you need to understand how this works. The process of local SEO is a little bit more involved than the search engine rankings. Local SEO is really about making sure your website appears at the top of the list when people are searching for local business in your particular area.
Before you can begin to understand how to get your website ranked in local searches, you must understand who performs local search. Local search is dominated by two types of customers. One type of customer searches for business using a specific city or region. The second type of customer is looking for services or products within a specific city or region.
There are many people searching for local businesses. Of these people, how many people are performing searches that bring them directly to a website? What percentage of these people are searching with a search engine, and what percentage are performing searches using specialized local listing directories? This information will help you understand why local seo is important. It’s also going to help you decide whether or not local seo is something that is going to be effective for your business.
When people perform searches using local listings, they are usually looking for local businesses in that local region. For example, if someone is searching for local dentists, they are likely going to search using both Google Places and Yahoo! Local. Of these, Google is likely to show the top ten websites by selecting “business directories” at the top of the search results. Yahoo!
The question is, are these the top ten websites among the search engines, and if so, why are they showing as the first few search engine results? If we were to analyze this using local seo strategies, it would be easy to see why this happens. If consumers say they want to find a dentist, they are typing in “dentist”, followed by the city name, then the state, then the zip code. As a result, when people perform searches using these parameters, they are seeing local businesses in each of these areas. This gives them options, and allows them to find what they are looking for.
Now let’s think about the other way of looking up an address. If someone were searching for a local business, they would simply use their city’s name to search for businesses in that area. This method does work, but there is one problem. Because Google, Yahoo! Local, and MSN Live Search are powered by the Google search engine, these results are going to be highly ranked. Therefore, if someone were to perform a search with “Google places” as the search string, then it is highly likely that the local services being displayed will not show at the top of the search engine results, because they are on the outside.
The other way to get around this problem is to include the city name within the URL. For example, instead of searching for a dentist in Cleveland, Ohio, you could type in “cheap dentisit” as the search string. By including the city name within the domain name, people will see the local businesses listed first in their results. In addition, because the search engines know how to count this in the results, these results will appear higher on the search engine pages.
A couple more things about local seo are that it can help you get local customers and visitors, which is great for your new business. Another thing is that it helps with SEO rankings and local advertising. You don’t want to have a website that shows up high on the search engine results for a certain keyword, but you want enough hits to your website to make it worth your while to pay for ads on that keyword. You might also find that having the local SEO firm do the website design and build the website, since most people use internet marketing to create a website.
