Website Designing, Portal Development & E-Commerce

Bring More Visitors to Your Site with Local Search Optimization!

Local search has surpassed the web yellow pages for the first time in this past year, with 58% of consumers using local search websites at least two times a week to find the products and services they need. Optimizing for local searches is really easy to do! Here are a few quick tips to get you started:

You re trying hard to publicize your business. You re listed in all the important phone books, your brochures are mailed out on a regular basis and your web-site is working hard to bring in local traffic for you. Or you ve been using tried and true traditional marketing methods, but you should make sure you site is optimized to bring in business from your city, surrounding counties and statewide.

1. Edit your listing in local search engines and directories
Check out your business listings online at Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, and MSN Live Search. If your business is not found, you should submit a listing to each, ensuring your visibility in at least the top two search engines. When checking or adding a business listing, make sure that your information is correct and that your business description is complete. You also require to use same keywords that appear on your web-site. Another nice strategy is to include the county in addition to the city on your business listing. finally, if you ve a nice photo to use of your business site or products, add it where appropriate.

2. Display business information clearly on the site
By including your location and contact information on every page of your web-site, you re not only ensuring that potential customers can contact you easily, you re also providing your location to the search engines, which look for local information about your site in the site code. By including full contact information on your contact pages and in the footer area of each page, you re increasing your visibility in local search engines.

3. Get your business rated
Google is one search engine that uses rating information in determining the ranking of a site in local search results. If your competitor s site has two ratings with 3-5 stars each, and you ve no ratings at all, the chances are nice that you ll be ranked much lower.Ask your satisfied customers to write reviews and rate your business at Google, Yahoo, and MSN. If you feel confident, you could even ask them to include keywords relevant to your services in the review, as an added SEO boost.

Add unique customer reviews slowly over time, and visit your reviews often, to give yourself the opportunity to respond to any poor reviews in a positive way. Even a poor review can help you, as it offers the opportunity to address any problem with your service or products.

4. Think mobile !
No longer tied to a desktop computer, people are increasingly using mobile devices to browse the web and find services in their area on the go. Find ways to make your site more available to local search, such as using mirrored sites developed with mobile users in mind. Having a strong presence in local search engines can bring in street traffic like rarely before! Mobile web users can turn in to an easy sale if they can find you quickly on mobile devices.

5. Make sure your site is search engine friendly
If you haven t already, you should make sure you ve the most search engine friendly web-site around! Spend a little time going through your site, identifying usability and crawlability issues before starting a local search blitz. If your site can t be efficiently crawled by the search engines, all of the offsite work you do will be for nothing. Do you have a site built in tables? Have it re-built in valid CSS and cleaned up, modern code. Also, don t hide critical information like your contact information in images, because search engines cannot read what is in an picture. Your investment in a properly coded web-site will bring you great returns! Appearing on the first page of any major search engine can make the difference between making and losing a potential sale. Since Google will often list the top ten local results at the top of the page, you require to hedge your bets and do all you can to take advantage of local search engine opportunities. Explore how local search optimization can help you with these great local search resources!

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