Here at Vertical Leap, we put a lot of emphasis on helping you find the right search market for your website. One of the most important aspects of this is to be able to dominate your local landscape. From a business perspective, potential customers are easier to find, convert and retain if they are within a couple of hours drive of your place of business, whether they are coming to you, or you to them. Even for e-commerce concerns that only inhabit the virtual world, there are strong marketing benefits from being able to position your website so that it appeals to customers where they live. Put simply, in terms of searches, localised searches might yield less traffic, but can lead to higher conversion rates and margins.
Let’s take a step back, though; what sort of searches do we mean when we talk about ‘local seo’?
Let’s use Vertical Leap as an example. We’re based in Portsmouth, so a local search for us could be anything from ‘SEO Hampshire’ to ‘SEO Brighton’ or even ‘Bristol search engine optimisation companies’.
As Google has tweaked its algorithm over the years to put more emphasis on bringing locally focussed returns to its customers, we have in turn written quite extensively on the subject; here are some blogs and papers that we’ve brought together to guide you through the local search waters.
Firstly, we have a blog that outlines the basic principles of attaining search visibility in a local search market:
Local SEO, Hampshire, England and beyond
Localised search is sometimes seen as the poor relation of ‘big box’ SEO; something to support a website’s traffic numbers in the absence of a page one ranking for a more generic, more competitive keyword that will bring a higher number of visitors…read more
We also have a white paper introducing location-based SEO that our customers have found useful over the years, you can download this for more info.
Here’s a couple of blogs with some tips on getting the most out of your local SEO
Local internet marketing for small businesses
If your business services clients within a tightly defined geographic region, then a global search engine optimisation campaign will be overkill for you. If you are an osteopath, a restaurant, a shoe shop, or a psychologist (amongst many others), your online marketing needs to take geography into account…read more
Factors affecting local search rankings
Customers I work with often have already made a “Local Business” submission in Google and are frustrated that the listing doesn’t rank any better than it does. As with normal SEO I don’t have a definitive set of rules that will make a local business rank in the top 3 but I do have 5 top tips that will improve your chances…read more
And finally, if you’re interested in the emphasis that Google is placing upon delivering locally relevant results to its search customers, we wrote a blog about that, too.
Google tweaking organic results personalisation again
It seems that Google is testing out geolocation again. This afternoon, when I search Google UK I get a box on the left hand side (which previously just used to say “Change location” or something like that), now says “Portsmouth, UK”). If I click “Change location” now, it tells me my location was auto detected…read more
We’re sure to write more about this topic in the coming months and years, here is a handy grouping of all our content on local SEO.