How can local search help my business?

Local Search is about to undergo a period of rapid growth, as search engine and content providers begin to recognise the value of providing local results to search engine users. How does your site perform when a visitor searches the local area for your services?

Even if your website performs well in search engine results normally, you might be disappointed with your local search results. With a recent Piper Jaffray report stating that approximately 30% of online searches contain a city, county or post code or 2.6 billion local searches performed each month; can you afford to have your website not perform well in a local search?

For some businesses, local search is the only thing they’re interested in. If you only provide services to the surrounding area, then Local Search is vital to the success of your website.

What is Local Search?

Local Search is a search performed with a location provided as an integral part of the query. That could be searching Google for ‘web design hertfordshire’, searching on Google Maps for ‘web design’ and Google automatically filtering the results based on your current location or maybe just searching an online directory such as Yell.com, where you search for a ‘Who/What’ and specify a ‘Where’.

Why is it important?

As mentioned above, approximately 2.6 billion local searches are being made each month and local search is set for a growth explosion. Local Search has just overtaken offline media such as the Yellow Pages and local newspapers for the most commonly used method for finding local services, suppliers and products. All of the offline directories and phone books are developing or already have an online service as they look to get in early with regards to local search.

One of the drivers of the growth of local search is the mobile search market. With more and more mobile phones and handheld devices connecting to the internet, the mobile search market is going through massive growth and the mobile operators (Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile) are all in agreement that local search is a logical fit for mobile devices.

How is it different from normal search?

Because of the information needed for to return local search results, the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) can’t collect data and build their index of websites in the normal way. Normally, a search engine has a program called a ’spider’, which visits websites, finds any links on that website and then visits those links, indexing as it goes and building up the huge databases that power the search engine. To return local search results, the search engine needs to know the address linked to that particular website and a spider cannot determine that information on its own.

So even if your website is performing well for search terms such as your company name or the service you provide, if you are not proactive in letting a search engine know the area or areas that you provide services to, you won’t perform well in local search.

So what does this mean?

Hopefully by now, you’ll have decided that you want to get in on Local Search at the ground floor. Before it explodes and ahead of your competitors. Local Search is currently a developing area, heading for massive growth.

To get a head start in Local Search, you need to be proactive: spend some time identifying the local directories and “Internet Yellow Pages” that serve your area and make sure you are submitted to those. Visit all the big search engines and get your business listed on their local search and map pages. Have a look at Google’s local search site. Visit the main online directories and make sure your details are listed.

If you’ve decided to improve your sites local search performance, then please contact us and we’ll make sure your website is optimised for good local search performance and do all the hard work for you.

Take a look at this video to find out more about Google Local Search: