How to give your website location relevance.

There’s no denying the fact that local is the new global. The one topic that seems to be very hot in 2010 is location aware services, and the race for ownership of the local advertising space is apparent throughout the web. Starups such as Gowalla and Foursquare  (see previous mention of their respective business models) are providing mobile applications in a bid to entice advertising dollars from local businesses, meanwhile Google, Yahoo (see Fire eagle) and other search providers are continually chasing the utopian dream of “I know where you are and I know what you meant”.

As studies have shown that the average internet user doesn’t know to use local modifiers in their terms, Google and others are figuring out ways to provide relevant local based advertising for terms that are very short tail and provide less search refinements to find what you are looking for.

For example, the average internet user when trying to find a product or service has been shown to simply search for “widgets”. This is likely to find widgets available across the globe, and a mix of global websites which provide this product or service.

When the user realises this, a search refinement generally takes places, and longer tailed keywords are used. e.g. “widgets in location”. As search becomes more and more location aware, relevant advertising around shorter tailed keywords becomes more accessible, and this shortcoming is eradicated.  Hence why we are seeing so much concentration on algorithms which try and work out the locality of a webpage , and its relevance to a particular area.

At the crux of it smarter search = more revenue for search providers.

So what can you do now, to bow to the gods of search, and make your website, or indeed web pages location relevant?

Local Business Listing

If we are talking local search relevancy, there’s no getting away from the main engine’s local business centres. Whilst most people have already twigged onto Google’s offering, and the subsequent traffic from map searches, submitting to Bing (US only link )  and Yahoo (US only link) is often forgotten.

If you are  interested in getting listed on Bing local in the UK, Microsoft currently use Multimap to provide their listings. To register with Multimap you have to use a company called Market Location. (see FAQ). Market Location Link: http://www.marketlocation.com/changereq/.

If you are interested in getting listed on Yahoo local in the UK, Infoserve is the local provider of information to Yahoo.  Well worth taking the time to fill that it.

So to recap, if you aren’t listed, work on doing that first across the three main search engines. It will be the ground work from which you provide local relevance for searches on your site.  If you are completely lost on how to add a business listing, try reading Google Maps help.

Building Relevancy

So now you’ve got listed, you are probably wondering how to work on improving existing listings. Search engines currently look at a number of factors when determining relevance for local terms. If links are the currency of the organic algorithm, then citations are the dominating factor with the local search algorithms.

What do you mean? Citations?

Citations (in terms of local SEO) are essentially trusted places that list your business address elsewhere on the web. The more mentions of your address and associated business, the more likely you have good coverage, and the likelyhood that you actually exist at a particular address. You can find these by browsing the local map results yourself, and viewing the “webpages” which show your address. It is a relatively trivial matter to browse competitors listings in this space, and pick off the websites which you know you aren’t already appearing.

The following are a small selection of sites, along with a few UK specific ones worth looking at for local citations.

Directories worth being in

http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
http://www.joeant.com
http://uk.dir.yahoo.com/

UK Local Citation providers

http://www.yelp.co.uk
http://www.thomsonlocal.com/free-listing.aspx
http://www.yell.com/
http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/
http://www.city-visitor.com/products/payment_free.html
https://www.touchtarget.com/product/home
http://www.scoot.co.uk/advertise/free-listing.html
http://webapp.localeze.com/extranet
http://www.finder.co.uk/

http://www.localdatacompany.com/
http://www.marketlocation.com/
http://search.infoserve.com/index.asp
http://www.city-visitor.com/
http://qype.co.uk/
http://www.trustedplaces.com/
http://www.brownbook.net/
http://www.yell.com
http://www.welovelocal.com
Touch Local
http://www.tipped.co.uk
http://www.timeout.com
http://www.squaremeal.co.uk/
http://www.applegate.co.uk/
http://www.ufindus.com/
http://www.bview.co.uk/
http://www.ukcities.co.uk/
http://www.smilelocal.com/
http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk
http://www.freeindex.co.uk/
http://www.bizwiki.co.uk

There are many more sites out there that Google use as data references. Its easy to see who these are by browsing through map results yourself. For the U.S. some of these are providing data:

US Local Citation providers

http://www.citysearch.com
http://www.infospace.com
http://www.insiderpages.com/
http://www.merchantcircle.com
http://www.mojopages.com/
http://www.whitepages.com/
http://www.yelp.com
http://www.yellowpagecity.com/

There are a couple of other things you can do to optimise your listing, as well as getting citations – particularly for the Google algorithm, including but not limited to:

• Having your service in your business listing title (not recommended by Google – but still works)
• Location in the contact page of the site.

More info on what works on David Mihm’s local search factors. Essential reading on local search.

Getting Reviews

Reviews are also playing a part in local search algorithms, and paying attention to that can pay dividends. You should be encouraging reviews from your existing clients on third party sites, particularly in service industries. Sites such as Yelp thrive on this, and as such became a bit of an acquisition target recently by Google. This deal later fell through with the two parties unable to agree on price. It does however show that Yelp have data that Google want to own, and the pushing of reviews on Google business profiles is another avenue that webmasters concentrating on improving local results should be looking at.

Once you’ve a Google profile setup, login to the business centre, and encourage customers to leave you reviews. A card such as the below, can be a clever way to connect your offline marketing with the online.

If you happen to be in the hospitality or travel sectors, reviews are especially important, not just because of local search, but because these places often rank highly in their own right. If you’ve a reputation management problem positive reviews on these sites can help to push negative reviews further down the SERPs.

Hospitality / Travel providers

http://www.10best.com/
http://www.chefmoz.org/
http://www.dine.com/
http://www.diningguide.com
http://www.dinnerbroker.com/
http://www.frommers.com/
http://www.gayot.com
http://www.giatamedia.com
http://www.greenopia.com/
http://www.holidaycheck.com
http://www.hotelchatter.com/
http://www.hotelguide.com
http://www.hotelguide.net
http://www.menupages.com
http://www.mytravelguide.com/
http://www.restaurantrow.com
http://www.travelocity.com
http://www.travelpost.com
http://www.tripadvisor.com
http://www.virtualtourist.com
http://www.zagat.com

If you are an e-commerce site that has a local service base – why not implement reviews on your own products, on your own site? Providing you supply reviews using the correct (hReview) format, this can be a simple way to grow.

Getting your source code right

Source code is the missing piece of the puzzle between what you provide on your website, and what the search engines interpret. This continues to evolve with their algorithms, and they are constantly supplying us with hints and tips on how to markup pages, that are often overlooked. To provide local relevancy you are going to need to do a few things. Firstly, make sure your contact telephone number and your locations’ address are on the site.

Yep – sounds straightforward and simple, but you’d be surprised how many people complain that they aren’t being found for local services, and yet haven’t went to the effort of adding their address.  How is any search spider going to figure out where you are unless you give that info to them? In addition to this, it does no harm to specify geo co-ordinates, and / or a geo entry in a sitemap.

As I’ve mentioned previously (see code audit) – Google have recommended two ways to mark this up in your code, Microformats or RDFa. They also have provided a RDFa / Microformats testing tool to check how it may appear in the SERPS.

All in all, its pretty safe to say that local isn’t going anywhere, and with new services appearing all the time, building on the work that others have already done in the space – preparing your site in this way can only serve to further establish it in a local market online.

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