Recently I did a guest blog post about Taking your Local Search to the next level of awesomeness. While researching into the impact of local search on small businesses I had the pleasure of talking to Todd Butcher of Pepperjam, who had some great ideas about local search. I did quote some of his thoughts in that article but thought that the rest of his ideas would be very helpful to businesses interested in local search.
Question: Given that fact that Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Yelp and other “yellow page” type services now include geo tagging, address, and often a map of a business location, would you say that getting these entries could
be helpful in your organic rankings, if you have a geographically
centered Keyword?
Todd: If a business cares at all about local search, they have to go after these entries. Here is why: First, if a searcher is sophisticated enough to actually search with a geotargeted term, the local results are the first thing you see on the SERPS. In addition, for many local listings there are sub categories linking off to sites that google feels provide valuable information about that business.
Quality Local Information
This means that sites which are acting as local aggregators of business information are going to motivated to provide thorough and accurate information to be listed there. This will greatly improve the overall search experience.
Google is Getting Geographic
Second, it seems many people simply search a term like “pizza” or “car dealer”. Search on these terms and Google will ask you to enter a zip code to better refine your search locally. This is just another example of the importance that is being placed on local results.
Also, I think Google is trying to take the emphasis away from other aggregators like Superpages and try to keep it all “in house” so to speak. For that reason, I think it’s important now more than ever for the 100% local business to position themselves to take advantage of these local results.
Advice for Local Business Owners
The bottom line is, if you are a local business, it doesn’t make sense to go after broad keywords. Geotarget. Do everything you can to get listed in these results. Of course, to make sure your site shows up in these results is a whole other SEO discussion.
