There has been a lot of emphasis on local search becoming more popular and prevalent as SMB’s become more aggressive marketing themselves online and implementing SEO strategies. There was a good article on iMedia Connection today about various ways to improve your local search results.
I just wish that the supreme powers (Google and Yahoo) would return local results more prominently. I can’t argue against other businesses that have invested in SEO strategies and return high in the SERP’s, but I am a marketer and understand this process. My mom, she has no clue and doesn’t care about some shop in GA or FL.
My example I used today to test about local search was ‘floral shop’ as I am interested in buying some flowers for Valentine’s Day. I live in Utah, so I would expect to see local floral shops, or more likely, the large national floral chains. Much to my surprise, the first listing was Seahorse Florists out of Jacksonville FL. There were actually quite a few other floral shops listed on the first page of results for other towns such as Buffalo, St. Louis and Memphis.
I was quite intrigued with the SERP’s after reading the article on local search. I am in Utah and the local returns are for shops on the other side of the Mississippi, that doesn’t help me find flowers for Valentine’s Day.
Just for fun, I then Googled ‘flowers’ and got results that I had expected on my first query, national retailers. Doing this little experiment about local search opens a lot of doors for small local businesses to find key terms that are derive from the normal search query like ‘flowers’ and rank on the first page for a similar search of ‘floral shop’. Using a strong SEO strategy and good local linking for local SMB’s looks like a good strategy, and there might be a better search experience future for people like my mom.
Tags: Local search, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SEM, SEO
