Targeting for Local Search
March 2, 2010 | No Comments »
Bird Rock Surf Shop
If you have a website for your small brick-and-mortar business ( and we hope you do ) you’d probably like to have your customers be able to find you online. You want customers to get a link to your site in a search engine when they do web searches that are related to business, and to do that, you need to optimize the content of your website for those searches. While there is a lot of good advice about optimizing for local searches at places like Local SEO Guide there is one tip that is both important and incomplete.
If a customer is doing a local search on a search engine, the customer is likely to use the name of a city, neighborhood or zip code, and that local term may not be the one in your address. Including your address on your web site is not good enough.
Suppose you have surf shop in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego, but you also serve people from Mission Beach, Bird Rock and La Jolla. You customer might be doing any of these searches:
- surf shop san diego
- surf shop pacific beach
- surf shop 92109
- surf shop la jolla
There are probably several dozen searches that the customer might use, so in addition to your address, your website should also include the zip codes and neighborhood names that you serve.
Also consider that your customers might be searching for a particular product, such as Sanuk sandals. Your customer might be searching for:
- sanuk bird rock
- sanuk 92037
- sanuk mission beach
- … etc …
So, you’ll want to have your zip-codes and neighborhood names on the same page as your top brand names.
Clarinova’s Front Window microsites do this automatically when the retailer enters the zip code and brand names for their stores. For instance, the Sanuk microsite for Mitch’s Surf Shop includes this text at the bottom of the pages:
Mitch’s Surf Shop serves the communities of North City, Cardiff by the Sea, Del mar, Rancho Santa Fe and Solana Beach. Mitch’s Surf Shop is conveniently near the zip codes 92075, 92091, 92007, 92014 and 92130.
Here is the text for the microsite for the Sanuk microsite for Pacific Beach Surf Shop:
Pacific Beach Surf Shop serves the communities of Pacific Beach, Bay Ho and San Diego. Pacific Beach Surf Shop is conveniently near the zip codes 92109, 92169, 92167, 92037 and 92138.
Text like this helps ensure that what every your customer’s search for, they will find your website.
