With Google’s recent changes to its search engine results pages (SERPs) giving more emphasis on local relevance than ever before, website owners and SEO professionals need to do more to convince the search juggernaut of their relevance within their geographic areas. In fact, the big new buzz word for SEO across the major search engines is “localization”.
When you now do a search in one of the major search engines, your physical location heavily influences which websites appear in the results. This is the case even if you don’t specify a location. So if you were to type a generic search term like “pizza” or “furniture” you will be shown local listings in the organic search results before international sites. If you want to get top organic search results, it is very important to create content that targets the geographic areas you do business in. Having your website pages focussed on location is not enough though; you also need to create link connectivity that focuses on your business locations.
Location Relevant Content
The idea of localising your content pages on your website is to cater your service information towards specific geographical audiences. At the very least, mention your geographic services areas on a country, state, city and suburb level. If you service or have a presence in a variety of locations, you should create dedicated pages for each. If you are a mail order business, for example, you can create a page discussing your shipping rates for different locations as well as warranty return locations. If you are a service company, you can list the areas that you operate in. When offering this kind of geocentric information, you not only increase your chances of being seen by the search engines as being locally relevant, you also improve your customer experience and the likelihood that they will want to deal with you. The more information you can supply to your customers on your website the better.
Local Inbound Links
The days of simply having keyword rich content, good titles etc and expecting your optimisation to be complete are long over. The next step is to build links from websites that are relevant to your locality. There are plenty of websites out there that can provide links to your locally focussed web pages:
- Local Web Directories
- Web Directories with Regional Categories (Like Yahoo)
- Locally focussed blog sites
- Country based price comparison sites
- Locally based business sites
Directory sites are often the easiest way to begin establishing your local presence with the search engines quickly.
Here are some good locality based websites that you can get locally oriented links from with a couple based within Australia:
Beyond the listings in directories where you can get a link to your main domain name, you should also pursue links to specific pages on your website that are related to specific locations, such as city or state based locations.
The better your content is in facilitating your customers with information that is helpful and location based, the more Google and other search engines will see you as being important and ranked accordingly. You basically want to prove that you are one of the top 10 websites about your topic in your area, so that is the calibre you need to aim for.
Get Local SEO Expert Advice For Local SEO Results
Professional SEO provides local SEO services for businesses in Melbourne, Australia. If you run a business website and operate in Melbourne, we are well positioned to help you achieve top results in the search engines for your target audience. Contact us today for a free consultation.
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