Why Local Search Matters
Posted by Yvette | Under Online Marketing Tuesday Feb 23, 2010
If you live in Los Angeles and you want to get your car washed, you may go to Google and type the keyword “car wash” into your Google search bar. Which result would be more useful? Getting random listings for every car wash from here to Switzerland or getting listings for car wash shops that are down the street from you? Obviously, the latter would be most useful, unless of course you’re doing some sort of cross continental car wash research.
People search the entire World Wide Web to find businesses that are in their own backyards. Google understands this. As a matter of fact they’ve understood this for quite some time. That’s why over the last year Google has been stepping up their local search results.
In the past, to search for car wash shops near you, you’d have to enter your zip code, the name of your part of town, or some other piece of information to let the search engine know that you wanted to narrow your search to a specific area. Now, Google assumes that people are intending to search locally for certain keywords, even if the user doesn’t specify a geographic location. Google uses the searchers IP address to narrow down their location to a broad geographic area.
So, if you go to Google right now and type in “car wash”, you’re likely to get listings for car wash companies in your area. The same goes for “McDonald’s”, “spa services”, and many other businesses that tend to cater to clients face-to-face.
Why is this so important? The local results will often appear before the top listings in the organic search results. So, if you’re at the top of the SEO game and your company has one of the top slots in Google’s organic search results, Google may actually list ten other businesses before yours because of their proximity to the searchers location. That’s right, ten other businesses!
Check out next week’s blog to learn how to get listed in Google’s local results. We’ll also talk about how utilizing Google’s local business tools can help your company grow.
Related posts:
[...] Last week we talked about how Google’s been expanding their local search results and what that could mean for your business. Last year Google began adding new features and abilities to their Google Maps system. Essentially, if someone searches for a company that mainly offers their products or services locally (i.e. a restaurant, salon, chiropractor, etc.), then in addition to getting natural search results, users will also see a list of companies that are located near their location, based on the searcher’s IP address. [...]