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Local Search for Local Businesses

Doug Williams @ 5:28 am

This blog entry was posted on December 7, 2008.

If you have a local business like a car mechanic, restaurant, dry cleaner or doctor’s office, you want to reach local people who are close enough to use your services. How do you target these people instead of people half a nation away? The answer is by optimizing your business website for local search.

What is local search?
Local searches use a general keyword phrase combined with a geographic location (state, county, city and zip code). People will search for “Dallas restaurants”, “Colorado eye doctor” and “San Diego car repair” when they need the services from a local business.

Benefits

  1. Targeted Traffic: By focusing on local search you will bring in targeted traffic to your website. These are local people that are looking for local businesses.
  2. Quicker results: It is much easier and faster to get top search rankings by localizing your website. There is much less competition for a local search phrase than a general nationwide phrase.

How to optimize your website for local search

  1. Keywords: Describe your business using general keyword phrases in the text throughout your website.  Talk about what you do and who you do it for.
  2. Location: Include your business address, phone number and a keyword rich tagline in text and on every page in your website.
  3. Headline: Use a general keyword combined a location for the primary page headline (heading text). “Denver Laser Dentist” makes a much better headline than “Welcome to our Website.”
  4. Title: Create a keyword rich Title Tag that includes both general keyword phrases combined with geographic locations. The Title META tag shows at the very top of the browser window. Search engines consider this to be very important.
  5. Description: Use the META description tag on each page as a mini-advertisement for your company and include your business phone number. Google will use this in the body of their search results. You will receive phone calls from people who are in too much of a hurry to even click thru to your website.

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Related posts:

  1. Why do local businesses need a website?
  2. 7 Ways to Get More Local Website Traffic
  3. Should a Small Businesses Blog?

Filed under: Local Search,SEO Strategies

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 5:28 am and is filed under Local Search, SEO Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Comments

  1. Thanks for a sharing this articles.

    Comment by Yachtcharter Griechenland  — November 13, 2009 @ 6:57 am

  2. Great info. This is part of the fundamentals of SEO.

    Comment by Dallas Internet Marketing Consulting — November 15, 2009 @ 3:54 am

  3. Hey webmaster! thanks for the info!

    Comment by plumber fullerton — July 22, 2011 @ 4:05 pm

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