Dynamic Business

I was having a chat with my neighbour last week. We started chatting about things of national importance, like what the surf was like at the moment, and if he was going out in the morning.

At some point we moved onto his business, and how his sales were tracking. He owns and operates an air conditioning company, so I expected him to say it was a little slow at the moment given it’s winter.

However business was good, and he had a strong pipeline – great for this time of year!

Well, it was all good until I found out how much he was spending, which was not inconsiderable. Particularly when he could be driving more leads (and sales) from his own website without too much effort.

Unfortunately he’s not alone. Here’s 5 tips to get more from local search for your business.

1. Location-based Content

It’s important that you review the content on your web pages to include geography based terms and content.

Add it to your HTML through page titles, as well as your page footer with addresses. Add it to your internal linking text, for example, ‘Manly air conditioning’, instead of just ‘air conditioning’.

Make sure you don’t overdo it, and keep real humans in mind (don’t do it just the search engines).

In addition to localised content on your site, you should consider adding content to sites like Flickr, YouTube and Slideshare and add localised tags, descriptions, links and file names.

2. Location Pages

Google SEO spokesperson, Matt Cutts, recently said “If your company has a bunch of store locations, please don’t hide that information behind a search form or a POST. If you want your store pages to be found, it’s best to have a unique, easily crawlable url for each store.”

This is about as clear an invitation to having location-based pages as you can get.

Businesses should consider separate pages for each location, suburb and community they serve. These pages should feature unique content and be optimised for hyper local search.

So continuing with our ‘air conditioning’ example, you would have different pages for each location…

• air conditioning Harbord
• air conditioning Brookvale
• air conditioning Manly
• air conditioning Manly Vale
• air conditioning Queenscliff
• air conditioning Fairlight, etc, etc

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