Local Search for National Companies

Local Search has been getting a lot of attention lately – we’ve even included it in our Top 4 SEO Strategies for 2011. For locally-focused businesses, it’s easy to see the benefits. However, nationally-focused businesses can also benefit – especially in the industrial sector. I just read a great blog post  at Search Engine Land that goes into detail on the why’s and how’s of nationally-focused companies benefiting from local search.

The search engines will often give localized results when they feel those results are relevant, even if the search didn’t type a city, state or other geographical qualifier. They use the searcher’s IP address location to determine locality. So, if I search for something in Minnesota, companies with a physical presence in Minnesota might get a boost in my search results. If I go to California and do the same search, I might see a different set of results with California companies getting higher priority.

Give it a try, just type in “pizza” and see if you get local results or national results. Basically, Google is saying – when you search for pizza, I think you want to find a place where you can eat pizza or have pizza delivered.

As the SE Land author states: “What this means for you, the national player, is that you are missing out on a potentially large, localized rankings boost for your major keywords by not having a physical address listing on your website.”

So, what do you need to do to have local search working for you? Here are a few things:

1. Make sure you have your physical address on your website. Putting that information in your site footer, as well as on your Contact Us page is helpful.
2. Update your Google Place Page and other local listings. We have a list of some local directories in a previous post.
3. Obtain links from local groups like the Chamber of Commerce, Better Business Bureau and local charities you support.
4. If you are a member of state/regional associations and organizations, especially when they are industry-related, make sure you get links from their sites too.
   Make sure you get links from the websites of your local distributors.

What other things are you doing to take advantage of local search?

Share this: