Local Search for National Companies
This blog entry was posted on December 11, 2009.
Should a business that markets nationwide be concerned with local search? They should if their product or service is consumed or searched for locally. A national restaurant chain may market nationwide, but people search for a local place to eat. It is more cost effective to optimize for local terms rather than investing in a national search campaign.
Even if a company wants to go after broader, national terms, it is not a bad idea to start out targeting local phrases where results can happen more quickly. Then follow up with a focus on the broader keyword phrases which will take longer depending on the competitiveness of the market.
Consumers today are placing trust more in local companies. Local search is one of the hottest growth areas in the Internet today.
Apartments for Rent
One company that advertises apartments for rent to a national audience has broken down their business into 60 metropolitan markets. They promote each metro market separately because people looking for apartments search locally.
They are not trying to have the number one organic ranking for “apartments for rent” which is a broad keyword phrase. Instead they are after dominating the local phrases around city names, neighborhoods and zip codes for the markets they compete in.
The same strategy would work well for any national chain where people use the service on a local basis. This could include self-storage units, restaurants and other franchises.
Location pages: Store locator pages by themselves are not enough. Instead look at creating optimized pages for each location with unique text on each page. Fully optimize each location microsite (cluster of related pages within a larger site) and then deploy a linking strategy using local city or neighborhood names.
Local Search: Directories such as Google 7-Pack display their results at the top of the search results page ahead of the organic search results. National chains should create a directory listing for each location. In addition, create listings for each location on Yahoo! And MSN Local. There are many other yellow page and other directory services.
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