It can be safely assumed that most businesses want to rank well for fairly general, highly competitive terms. After all, there’s usually a great deal of traffic to be gained from those keywords. Businesses both small and large will typically invest a great deal of time and energy into capturing those coveted terms. However, these same businesses may not be going after local searches as aggressively.
A possible reason? Local searches don’t account for the lion’s share of searches across Google–only about 20%, in fact–but they can often return higher conversion rates. In addition, that 20% jumps to 40% on mobile platforms. Translation: If you aren’t optimizing your digital storefront for both local searches and mobile platforms, you might be missing out on a sizable chunk of potential customers.
So how does one go about this process? There are myriad ways to insure you’re on the right track. Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Location Pages: Whether you have only a single brick and mortar store or own a national chain, a location page with relevant information (e.g. address, hours of operation, phone number) should be created for each one. Do the same for the mobile version of the site with pertinent information readily clickable and “mobile-friendly”.
- Social Media: Include links to facilitate sharing on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp. Even foursquare check-ins could prove useful in this ever-changing field.
- Submissions: Make sure your localized pages are submitted to the proper search engines, directories and information services (e.g. the Yellow Pages).
Again, these are just a few ideas to get you started. If done in conjunction with a proper and ethical search engine optimization campaign, they can increase the possibility of capturing the coveted top spots on local and organic SERPs.