Optimizing Your Website for Local Search

May 21st, 2008 Posted in Local Search, Offsite SEO

Printed search is dying. Newspaper readers have converted to online local search and feed readers. Even online shopping is increasing at a significant rate; 1/3 to 1/2 of holiday spending is spent online even in most major cities.

The Yellow Pages

A direct comparison can be made between the Yellow Pages and the Internet Yellow Pages. How many people will bother getting up, picking that thick yellow book, and searching for what they need in some 1000 odd pages or so, when they can just plug in a simple query online and find their results in 7 seconds? That’s a rhetorical question… you already know the answer.

Local Search Is Taking Off

With the recent and upcoming growth of mobile search, local search will be a force to be reckoned with so it is to everyone’s advantage to get registered today and claim your spot in the major local search engines and portals. You might not see a significant statistical growth in traffic tomorrow or even a month from now, but you will be poised to receive all those random searches for your location. Remember the early bird gets the worm. Don’t wait to optimize for local search when there are already 1000 or more listings for your area.

Onsite Local Search Optimization

Be sure to include geographical information like your real world address on your pages. Your information should be included in HTML so the spiders can read it. Proper places to put this information include in the meta tags, title tags, at least one header tag (probably on the contact page), at the top of your pages, and/or in the footer of your pages.

A whole new breed of spiders is looking for area codes, zip codes and city names, to assist searchers in finding stores and services near their location. Even whole phone numbers are quickly being picked up and cached for future reference.

Optimizing in this way will allow you to come up ahead of the competition when someone searches for a business in your industry, or even if they just search for your geographic region.

Using hCard Markup

This is not a necessary technology, but it provides a web standard for listing contact information moving forward that is machine readable and easily styled.

hCard, which is short for HTML vCard, is a microformat for publishing the contact details of people, companies, organizations, and places, in a variety of online formats including XHTML, HTML, RSS, Atom, and XML. hCard uses a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC 2426) properties and values.

To code an hCard on your site, you might use the following code:

<div class="vcard">
<div class="fn">Jane Doe</div>
<div class="org">A Company Name</div>
<div class="tel">555-555-4321</div>
<a class="url" href="http://www.example-url.com/">http://www.example-url.com/</a>
</div>


Read more about the hCard and related vCard standards here.

Offsite Local Search Optimization

Top Resources: As always the main battle is between Yahoo, Google, and MSN.

• Get listed with Yahoo Local
  Yahoo! Local - Yahoo! does not require manual confirmation.
• Get listed with Google Local
  Google Local - Google will send you a postcard with a confirmation code once you submit your listing. This can take 4-6 weeks.
• Get listed with MSN Live
  MSN Live - Microsoft launched their attempt to compete with Google and Yahoo! for the local search market in the fall of 2007. The partnerships between Microsoft and several other companies that offer state of the art technology for imaging and mapping, has resulted in a high quality user interface, which should prove to be some serious competition for the big 2 in the near future.

Second Tier: These are the sites that have high PR, plenty of backlinks, and a hearty following, but they are still only secondary in importance for local search concerns.

• Get listed with Merchant Circle
  Merchant Circle - They let you promote your business with a variety of tools including custom anchor links, business reviews, and a public blog. Part of the custom URL for your business includes your phone number.
• Find out more about getting listed with Ask City
  Ask City - Ask City was launched by Ask to compete directly with the big 2. Neither Google nor Yahoo can compete with the interactivity provided by their map technologies. You can utilize a sitemap and a robots.txt file to have a chance to get listed quickly, or you can use their ping service to notify Ask City about your updated sitemap. Learn more.

The Little Guys

• Get listed with Verizon Superpages
  Verizon Superpages - For printed Yellow Pages, Verizon is the king, but their online version has a long way to go to catch up with the big boys. By the way, if you add your listing you will probably receive a call from a sales rep trying to sell you their Pay Per Click services. I’ve not spoken to a business owner yet who has kept the service for more than a year, but you make your own decision.
• Get listed with Yellow Pages
  Yellow Pages - This is the paper yellow pages book brought online. They have made no effort to make the user interface competitive with the top tier sites. Less than 5% market share.
• Get listed with Local
  Local - They have the best domain name, but they don’t do anything with it. With a market share under 2% they need to make vast improvements to really make their service compete with anyone else.
• Get listed with True Local
  True Local - True Local is a free local search directory. You must be brick and mortar to be listed. They are apparently working on a few new features, so maybe the service will be better in late 2008.

The Rest

• Get listed with InfoSpace
  InfoSpace - Just a small time local search site who has developed the proprietary metasearch technology that is used on insignificant search engines like DogPile and WebCrawler.
• Get listed with Yelp
  Yelp - Yelp is more of a local search community than it is a local search engine. It is user driven, rather than business driven like MerchantCircle. Could provide a limited opportunity to network in your area.
• Get listed with ZoomInfo
  ZoomInfo - From their website: “ZoomInfo is the premier business information search engine, with profiles on more than 37 million people and 3.5 million companies. ZoomInfo delivers fresh and organized information on industries, companies, people, products, services and jobs.” I guess a link is a link.
• Get listed with YP
  YP - YP.com isn’t even a real site. It exists within the LiveDeal.com infrastructure. Once again, a link is a link.

New and Untested

• Get listed with Local Buzzer
  Local Buzzer - This is a brand spankin’ new site with lots of potential. It is a community driven site, but mixes map search with review-based search. The front page is the search page, and its user interface is about as simple as they come. It has potential.

Local Data Publishers

• Get listed with Marketing Leads USA
  Marketing Leads USA - Marketing Leads USA is one of the most comprehensive local data providers online. Their databases are tops in the industry for business, executive, and consumer data. Since they are able to offer discounted services, their data will be put into widespread use across the Internet and the offline sales and marketing world going forward.
• Get listed with InfoUSA
  InfoUSA - InfoUSA is more of a gigantic database than a local search directory. Their data provides many of the smaller local search engines with data for their search results.
• Get listed with Localeze
  localeze - Localeze is a business data aggregator. Directories use their feeds and datasets to populate their database backends.
• Get listed with iBegin Source
  iBegin Source - iBegin Source is another business data aggregator. They supply yellow pages and marketing firms with US and Canadian business data.
• Acxiom - Acxiom is another online data provider. Their data is used to populate and validate many other corporate and business database. There is no link to add your business.

Avoid the companies and websites that want to charge you $199 to get listed in all the local search engines. You can just take an hour or so and manually do this yourself. Unless you are a multi-million dollar corporation, this type of expense doesn’t make much sense to me.

View the Fitness Top Sites List

Tags: google, local, msn, yahoo