Why is local search considered so important, given the fact that local search drives only a small fraction of the entire traffic?

Why do you hear small businesses spending a good amount of resources on optimizing their online store for local searches, instead of attracting a varied global audience?

By Pandia Guest Writer Lior Levin

The catch is: local search traffic is considered the most effective, when you are talking about conversions, sales of products and recurring benefits.

To give you a data centric example: 10 Local hits are considered more superior than 500 global hits, because statistics shows that out of the meager 10 local hits, 3 or 4 people will actually buy something from your physical store.

While there is no guarantee that out of the 500 global hits that your website receives every single day, a single person will ever visit your physical store in his entire life.

So it actually doesn’t even matter if your website gets millions of hits from Japan, when your physical store is in New York.

There are basically two main goals of local search engine optimization

• Ranking for the keywords and phrases used by “local” customers. It is important to know and focus the keywords used by actual users, not the jargon used in your industry.
• Gauging the competition of important keyword phrases and finding the reasons why your competitors are ranking while you are left behind.

I would assume that you are familiar with Google Places and have registered your business listing there. If you haven’t created your Google Places listing yet, better do it now. Its free!

Here are some tips which will help you get ahead of the competition in local search results:

Provide Something Exclusive

If your business is facing a lot of competition from other local small businesses, this is the right time to rethink your business strategy and take your business to a new dimension. You have to provide something extraordinary, something exclusive and something very unique which your competitors don’t have or provide.

You have to make sure that your targetted users know the name of your brand by “a unique value” (and not just another store selling women’s garments).

When you provide distinguished value to your customers, they will surely do business with you at a later point of time. Moreover, these are the factors which creates “Goodwill” of your business and motivates users to write reviews of your product/service in their personal blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Google Places listings and so forth.

Result: you get tons of good reviews and backlinks for free, which elevates the link profile of your local business listing.

This is sometimes called “organic goodwill” and it is by far, one of the best ways for any business to succeed and beat his competitors. This is also, one of the hardest things to achieve but if you can somehow twist your business model and align it to provide additional value, everything else is just a matter of time.

On Page Changes

In order to make sure your website shows up on location specific searches, you have to optimize your website for location specific keywords. Here are some pointers that must be taken care of:

• Landing pages must contain the name of the business, main keyword and the name of the location. For example: If you have a physical shoe store in New York that specializes in Nike Shoes, the title tag of your “Nike Shoes” landing page should be – “ Buy Nike Shoes In New York – ABC Store”
• Split testing is a must. You have to alter the title tags once in a while and use Google Analytics to determine which title tag combination gets the maximum hits. It is indeed a good idea to rotate through different title tag combinations and track their performance. Next, stick to the one that drives more conversions or sales, not hits.
• The URL of your landing page should be in harmony with the title tag and theme of your website. An ideal URL in our example would be – www.domain.com/nike-shoe-store-new-york.html and not something as www.domain.com/shoes/1193674.html
• This is important. You have to gain backlinks with proper anchor text from similar sites that specializes within your business niche. Blogs, online forums and web directories are a great place to promote your business and gain backlinks with your required anchor text, In our example – “Nike shoes in New York” sounds perfect, but you have to make sure that different domains link to your landing page with slightly different anchor texts (and not exactly the same duplicate one).

  Sometimes, you may have to “buy” links from popular blogs within your niche. This is an extremely risky zone, so be careful and do not overdo your link campaign just to get penalized by Google and other search engines. A Link building campaign once in every 3-4 months is considered safe practice.

• Include your business address in the footer of your website. This address should be exactly similar to the one you have used in your Google Places business listing. If possible, include a valid email address, phone number, fax and other contact details.
• On your website’s about page, include a map snippet of your Google Places listing and link to it (do not use rel=”nofollow”). Again, it is a good idea to literally “claim” your business listing and prove that you are actually the owner of this business.
• This is not actually an “On page” change but an important one. Login to your Google webmaster tools account and set up Geo-targeting. Setting up Geo targeting in Google Webmaster tools tells Google that your business is specifically suited for users of a particular country and not the entire world. While it won’t do you any harm as far as global traffic is concerned but it is a good way to ensure that Google knows the location specific “genre” of your website.

At the end of the day, beating your competitors in Google local search depends on how many good reviews you have, how many unique domains are linking to your website and how much users actually love your service. These on page changes only makes sure that you have got the technical details right, everything else depends on good customer service, great product and unique value towards your customers.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that produces custom neon signs, and who also consults for a company that offers psd to html 5 service.