Now, it’s important to understand that when you do a local search, the major search engines pull data from main indexes (Excluding the PPC index). They have the regular organic search results, which are based on the keywords and, to some degree, your location. (Even if you don’t use a geographic term in your search, Google is likely to find organic pages that it thinks are from businesses in your area.) But it also has a totally separate index to pull from, the Local results, providing the data. We need to optimize your web-pages to reach people locally.
This type of data is both good and bad. It’s good, because it gives you an extra chance of ranking. Perhaps you’re not doing too well in the organic results, but you are doing well in the Local results, and your site appears high on the page next to the map. Or, if you do a really good job, your business can turn up in the local search results — up by the map — and in the organic results, probably lower down on the page (not always; sometimes the map and Local results are displayed before the organic results, sometimes embedded in them). The bad part is that you have more work to do: They are completely different indexes, so you need to do different things to rank well in each one.
So your job, if you want to rank well for local searches, is to know what to do for both of these indexes. I begin with the index I’ve been telling you about already, the organic-search index, and then I discuss the Local index.
“Localizing” Your Web Pages
So the very first step to take if you want to rank locally is to make sure that you have local terms in your pages. Ideally, have these terms not just in a Contact Us page but on every page.
The issue with inserting your location in just your Contact Us page is always that while you’ve most likely created dozens , scores , possibly a huge selection of high quality keyword-rich pages of content , you have only removed one of the most beneficial keywords and phrases and put it on a different page . If you wish Google to consider a page is related to a certain specific location in addition to finding selected keywords , it is advisable to make sure that the location name and keywords be displayed on the same pages ! So , below are a few things you can try out :
✓ Include your Complete address in your Web-pages . Include your street , city , state , as well as zip code . Although you may set the address in the footer , if possible it must be near the top of the web-page somewhere . If you have one or more address , put all of the addresses on each individual web-page .
✓ Include in all your web pages the names of every locations you’re interested in . Include a directory of city names, as an example , in your footer or in a sidebar , if possible with hyperlinks to web pages with information regarding each of those cities .
✓ Create Contact Us Page for every location where your company is situated. Assume, If you have 4 office locations, then you need to create 4 Contact Us pages.
✓ Try to put high quality keywords on your Contact Us each individual pages.
✓ Find other reasons to mention the city and zip code in the body of your text. If possible, put them in tags; use bold font on some of the references, too.
✓ Always put your location names in your file names. Your URL should contain the name of the location for which you are trying to rank well. So, for instance, instead of yourdomain.com/florist.html, you could use youdomain.com/florist-kolkata.html.
✓ Include the city name in your TITLE and DESCRIPTION meta tags.
✓ During Link building try to put the city and state names in the link when linking from other sites to yours.
You can also read this post: How to build an effective internet presence for success in business
You need to think very carefully about what location names are truly essential . Unique variations of searches use different varieties of location search terms .
For instance, when people search for Plumber, they often search with a state name: Plumber in Arizona, Plumber Houston, and so on. For real estate, people usually search with city names or even neighborhood names. For attorneys, people generally use city name for the search term but rarely use neighborhood names as search term.
So you should think about which terms are important and target those terms. Keywords with combination of Products or Services with the location names. Getting some keywords, which is links to your website with your Product or service keyword with the location names can be very powerful.
