Local search is when a buyer submits geographically constrained searches and gets local results that are relevant to their local area based on a structured database of local business listings developed by the 3 major search engines.
Typical local search queries include not only information about “WHAT” the user is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also “WHERE” information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or a geographic description (Or, even your IP address location which can be tracked).
A search that includes a location modifier, such as “Fort Worth” or “zipcode”, is an explicit local search. Examples of local searches include “pest control 76137“, “Keller restaurants“, “doggy daycare Flower Mound” and “emergency plumber Mansfield, Tx“. Local searches exhibit explicit or implicit local intent and often times will produce listings with a corresponding map especially Google.
A search that references a product or service that is typically consumed locally, such as “restaurant” or “carpet cleaning”, is an implicit local search. Therefore, it is extremely important to claim your Google Places page and/or your Yahoo Local / Bing Local pages. For best results, you will need to do local search optimization.
Still not clear about
- Check out some great articles on how to start using Local Search for your local business.
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For many small or local businesses, geographic boundaries play a factor on the customers they can serve. So, to ensure your business is reaching the right.;
1. Yelp
2. Foursquare
3. Merchant Circle
4. Manta
5. CitySearch
6. LocalEze
7. LinkedIn
9. Whitepages
10. Supermedia
11. Yellowbook
12. Brownbook
13. Mapquest
14. SmartGuy.com
15. Local.com
16. YellowPages.com
17. ThinkLocal
18. CitySlick
19. USYellowPages
20. MyCity
21. Kudzu
22. Discover our Town
23. BizJournals.com
24. TeleAtlas
25. Justclicklocal
No, Local Search Citations are not quotations from or a reference to a book or author.
Citations instead are directory type web pages that have your company information listed on them. Google, Bing & Yahoo crawl these directories when they are searching the web for new content and when they find information that matches your business name, address and phone number (NAP), the search engines consider those to be citations and will sometimes add that info to the bottom of your Google Places page or Yahoo Local page.
The more Local Search Citations that can be found for your business, the more relevant you appear to Google’s algorithm. So you want to have as many citations for your business as possible and you want each listing to match up exactly to your Google Places page according to your NAP (Name, Address, Phone).
Adding a listing to these online directories can be very time consuming; however, it is highly recommended because you will have more relevance in the search engines algorithms. Click here for our Top 25 recommended Local Search Citation Directories!
Each month there are billions of unique searches done on Google, Yahoo or Bing. More and more of those searches have a local intent and/or they actually use geo-codes like a city, state or zip code to narrow down the search results.
The leading geo-code expert, Ian White, CEO of Urban Mapping estimates that about 40% of search queries have Local intent including use of a city and/or state or even informal terms like neighborhoods.
In fact, Google has even stated that the Proportion of Google result pages that show a map in search results are 1 in 13.
So it’s not too hard to figure then that if Google has stated in the past that almost 8% of the time, their local map shows up in their search results, IF you’re not optimizing for local search, you are missing out on a significant opportunity for your local business to be seen.
I’ve included the most current search stats from comScore so we can do the math. That’s somewhere between 880,000,000 and 4,400,000,000 opportunities to be seen.
So that’s why local search is so important!
PS. Please tell us what you think of our Local Search Wiki!
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In a recent blog article on Cliconomics.com written by Jared Croslow, keyword research was done for the top 5 cities in the U.S. for local keywords searched with a geo code.
Based on this keyword research, the top local searches were:
Google caters much more to location-based search and local business search than ever before, and that trend is likely to continue. Don’t let your local business get left behind. Stake your local claim on google before your competition does and get a head start on building your local search advantage.
Here is a great article from WebProNews that covers the question of “Is Ranking Number One in Google Losing Its Significance?”
“Mobile is the fastest and cheapest way to reach the largest number of people,” said Chris Sacca, head of special initiatives at Google. “There are billions of people on this planet who still don’t have access to the Internet. And we think mobile presents the biggest opportunity to get them on the Internet.”
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/Google-bets-on-mobile-market/2100-1039_3-6199725.html?tag=st_lh#ixzz1EmhZ9IbN
Google recently confirmed that social networking has an impact on their search results.
Matt Cutts, who implemented Google’s webmaster guidelines and crack down on link spam, said in the Spring of last year that Google’s search algorithms did not take into account social networking elements when determining the search results for a website. However, that has all now changed.
What does that mean? Simple: If you do not have a social media strategy in place, your website/business may lose relevance in terms of search results. So social media will have a major impact upon how SEO is done in the future.
Google has indicated that this does not mean that the more followers a business has on Twitter or Facebook, the higher it will ranked in search results; instead, the social reputation of followers will be factored in to determine search outcomes.
How it all works is not clear as we are still studying the new patterns; but, one obvious key to success is to have your followers ‘re-tweet’ your Twitter posts.
