Local SEO Starter Kit
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With widespread adoption of smatphones and mobile Internet, local search engine optimization has gained in importance. While a lot of techniques used for regular SEO still hold for local SEO, a few other things need to be considered for better results. In this post, I tried to conduct a survey of the most basic techniques regarding local SEO.
Location-aware services
The first thing to consider is that local SEO is not only about search engines: it is also about maps and other location-aware web applications. Think of integrating with Google Maps (including Place Pages), Bing Maps and Yahoo Local but also a whole bunch of local business listings and 411-like services like Yelp, Canada 411, Superpages, FourSquare and Gowalla.
One way crawlers relate webpages to locations, is through the address. So your address should appear in a couple of pages (ex: Contact and About) in a consistent way so the crawler ‘has enough evidence’ that it is your address. Use a standard format like the following:
Company name
Street Address
City,State/Province,Zip/Postal
Phone WITH AREA CODE
Part of your local SEO task is to make sure your website is registered with your company address. This is because search engines give some importance to the registrar’s address. If it is the same as the address that shows in your website, then there ‘is a match for the crawler’.
The usual SEO stuff
Your title, description and H-tags are still very importance in local SEO. The difference is that you should have location or city information in them. In other words, what you are saying to the crawler is that “this page is about this business that does thins thing in this city”.
We all know about the importance of backlinks and how to get them. When it comes to local SEO, your backlinks should contain location information in anchor text for better results. This is the same logic as for tags inside your webpages.
Consumers Willing to Pay For Online Content
It wasn’t long ago when Variety.com announced their decision to charge fees for some of their content. Recently, a survey conducted by Nielsen Wired shows that consumers are willing to pay for online content. Most interesting of all are findings about social communities and blogs where 28% and 20% of consumers have paid or would consider paying for those types of content respectively. Taking into consideration that the public doesn’t always understand the value of social media, this is an interesting finding indeed.
It all looks like people are willing to spend more than just their ISP subscription fees. In fact, 2009 has seen a rise in e-commerce spending compared to 2008 which was a better economic year. What it means is that people see their Internet connection the same way as they see gas for their car: it will get them to the store, but you still have to pay for a product. This is good news as the potential of e-commerce are great and will have beneficial effect to other sectors of the economy.
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