Speak Local

Are you a local business that serves a local market?

Are your products or services in great demand by your community?

But wait a minute… 

When people look for you on the web, you don’t show up. 

Why not?

Search engines need local keywords in order to find your website; just as they need keywords that describe what your products or services offer online searchers. 

Searchers Want Local Results

Think about it.

When someone is looking for pizza, a haircut, or an oil change, they are most likely not looking to find a national company ranked globally for the search terms. 

Instead the searcher wants the pizza place or salon just down the road. 

Search engines like Google have gotten smart enough to recognize that certain types of searches should return local results to be the most relevant to the searchers. 

So how do you get your business found in local searches? 

Give the search engines something to find. 

This is a common mistake. 

Many small business owners completely overlook including local keywords on their websites. 

The truth is that there are numerous methods to improve the chance of getting found in local search results. 

Five Tips for Local Search

• Tip 1: Make it easy to be found by registering with free local directories like Google My Business and Yelp for Business. 
• Tip 2: Include local terms in your domain description and page names. 
• Tip 3: Include local terms in the text of your pages.
• Tip 4: Put your full address in every web page. Have more than one address? Put them all.
• Tip 5: Move the local keywords up on the page, instead of having them only in the footer.  

Let’s look at an example of how to include lots of local keywords in a website. We’ll look at an example of a fictitious local pizza restaurant called Lucy’s Pizza Palace.

• Register with Free Directories

The first thing I would do is register on Google My Business and Yelp. 

You can find registration instructions by going to Google My Business and Yelp For Business. 

• Include Local Keywords in Domain Description

Don’t forget to put the city name in your title and description meta tag. This is the information that appears after your domain name when your website shows up in the search results. 

For instance, instead of using just “Lucy’s Pizza Palace,” I would include “Lucy’s Pizza Palace, the best pizza in Denver Colorado. Just ask our happy customers.”  

• Include Local Keywords in Web Pages

Include the name of your city, state, and region in the text of your web pages. 

Remember that if you don’t say it, the search engines can’t find it.

You can use this technique even on pages like “Contact Us.” 

Here’s an example: 

Instead of just putting “Contact Us” and a form, “Lucy’s Pizza Palace” Contact Us page includes keywords such as: 

“Contact Us at Lucy’s Pizza Palace, the only specialty pizza restaurant within walking distance of the city Courthouse, Denver, Colorado.” 

• Include All Locations

Do you have multiple locations? 

If so, consider creating a “Contact Us” page for each location. 

Put the full address for each location on the individual “Contact Us” pages. 

(And take this opportunity to include some additional powerful keywords in the text of each page.)

• Move Up Local Keywords

Search Engines, just like people, equate the position of the keywords with the relative importance of the terms. 

Think of how newspapers attract attention to important news: they put it in the headline. 

Similarly, you should include local keywords higher in the page if you want them to be noticed by people and search engines. 

Increase the chances that you’ll get noticed by moving local terms about your business up on the page; don’t bury them in the footer.