The Importance Of Getting Listed For Local Searches

When you are optimizing your website you should make sure that your website gets listed for local searches. As per available data on internet searches, it has been noted that around 30% of the searches include, city, state or country. A considerable percentage of searches also include zip code. Irrespective of the nature of your business, customers always prefer to work with local companies because it is much easier for them to get in touch with local companies rather than a company that they cannot drive to if required. So you must take advantage of this customer trend and make sure that your website is featured in the search results when local searches are made.

Optimizing your website for local searches should be relatively easier because you are narrowing down your competition level considerably. If you do not optimize your website for local searches, you will be competing with global searches and the number of websites searching for global positions will be much higher than the number of websites that is competing for a specific location. So optimizing your website for local searches you will enjoy double advantage. Firstly, you will get better positions in the search results and secondly, you will be able to tap the local searches that amount to 30%.

When you are optimizing your website for local searches, you should include geographic qualifiers in the search terms or keywords such as city name, state, and country. For example rather than optimizing your website for “search engine optimization service” when you are targeting for local searches your keywords would be something similar to, “search engine optimization Michigan”, “SEO services Perth” etc.

As going one step further on this concept, you can target local searches even if you do not have any local presence. You can have a special page for every city that you are targeting. However, make sure that the content in each page is unique and do not use boilerplate content in each page even though the services you are offering and the features of your services are the same for every city. Using the same content in multiple pages will flag the search engines for duplicate content and your website will be subjected to unnecessary scrutiny by the search engines that could affect your website’s ranking.
You can increase your website’s conversion rates by carefully optimizing your web pages for local searches. Search engine trends indicate that customers that search with city or zip code as a search parameter have more immediate needs and hence they are more prospective customers. Therefore, it makes sense to concentrate more on local searches from where you can get a major portion of your sales conversions. Choose your keywords carefully for local search and optimize your website’s content as well for local search so that you can tap on the potential of the local searches. This does not mean that you should totally ignore global searches if your services are not limited to local customers.

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