SEO TIPS: Using Geography To Increase Site Hits

Are you doing everything you can to make sure that you get as many possible types of listings for your site as possible? Most webmasters will tell you they are, even if they are missing one of the easiest and most effective ways to get more traffic to their site – local listings. It is easy to forget sometimes, but local listings can make a huge difference, particularly considering how much more traffic is coming from mobile devices now versus just a couple years ago. As there is no slowing down for this trend in sight, if you aren’t going local, you are doing it right!

When you optimize your site, you need to 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 which is a tremendous amount of refined search traffic to tap into. A considerable percentage of searches also include zip codes or even area codes.

When optimizing for local searches, include geographic qualifiers in the search terms or keywords such as city name, state, and country. 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. This immediately makes you relevant to a whole new demographic that can find you quickly rather than wading through what may be pages of returns or not finding you at all.

You can target local searches even if you do not have any local presence. A great technique that has been known to work wonders is creating a special page for every city that you are targeting. The key to making this actually work is having content on each page that is unique rather than generic content even though the services you are offering and the features of your services are the same for every city. This has everything to do with avoiding duplicate content issues and expanding the amount of ways you are indexed as comprehensively as possible.

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 which means they are ready to convert. It makes sense to concentrate more on local searches  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. Don’t ignore global traffic, but keep it all in perspective and go where the money is.