Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Localization is a new term which is being heard in the internet search industry these days.
Any one heard about Local SEO???

Yes of course.

Google has changed! Its now much more local. How do you know? The map results are now at the top of all results. 80% of google searches are local! Yes - its true.

Step 1:

If you are a local business go to google and type in your company name and location.

Step 2:

You will see Google has given you a place page (your very own google page). Claim it!

Step 3:

Your rank in Google will depend on testimonials, if you've claimed your page and other factors. By knowing what to do you can get your business to the top of local search.

Step 4:

By claiming your page you can now do a number of things to drive customers to your business - local coupons, local SMS to customers, SMS customer loyalty programs.

Imagine this - your business is always slow on Tuesday. Send a coupon for a 20% discount which is only available on Tuesday! Problem solved.

There really are hundreds of ways to significantly gow your business through this local SEO / marketing approach.

Let me know if I can help - this is one area where I'm having a lot of traction.

Andrew

Hi AdvisorGarage,
Thank you so much for giving me a good information about Local SEO.This will definitely help me to improve my SEO.

Really a very well description of local SEO AdvisorGarage. Some good tips to follow if want to rank well locally.

Local SEO simply means to get your name, website and business in front of the people that are most likely to use it, people that are in your vicinity. One key factor in local SEO is choosing the right local keywords for your business. For example if you live in New Jersey and you own a bridal store you want to focus your keywords on something that's more specific to bridal NJ as opposed to being general.

local SEO means that if your florist shop is located in Ferndale, Michigan, potential customers will find your shop by searching locally. There are specific tactics and techniques that can and should be used to ensure that your SEO is targeted to a local audience.It is important to include your physical address on your website and your zipcode, city and state on your site titles. This information will get indexed and referenced by search engine spiders. It is the first step toward localized SEO and one that is often forgotten.

Just to build on Andrew's comments. A great strategy for building local awareness is to get customer reviews. Peer review or customer reviews are the most influential form of advertising. Google knows this and they are not only using consumer reviews to build awareness for their "places" initiative which is replacing maps, Google is also linking reviews into their organic search results. Here is an example. Look at the listing for Open Road Honda ouch. Results are dependent on the browser your using this example doesn't show up using IE  but it does using FireFox.

Here is an image of the same. Note: my family has purchase 5 cars from this dealer and have always been very satisfied. But you wouldn't know it from their online reputation.

Right now reviews are still pretty new so most local businesses have few or now reviews at all.  The point being, local businesses need to claim their Google Places and MerchantCircle listing and get customer to write reviews regularly. Also have reviews witten on yelp and insiderpages. They are all FREE and Google will pick them up FREE to you. NICE

thanks for the post

really informative

thanks for the information

it is new for me

really nice post

Hi Andrew. Thanks so much for sharing these with us. It is very helpful.