Local pack

All these local pack display formats pull listings from the search engine’s local database, not from its web index. To be included in these local pack listings, the business owners of these sites at some point completed a business listing form with Google. If you haven’t done this yet, take a little time now and register your business with the local directories for all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). For detailed instructions, see Book I, Chapter 4.

After you have your business listing set up with each search engine, you can enter the race. All the relevant businesses then jockey for position. While different areas and industries vary in competitiveness, having content that’s locally optimized and high quality helps you gain one of those coveted local pack spots.

To qualify for a local profile with Google My Business, you need to have a physical presence where in-person contact with customers during stated business hours is available. Google allows certain exceptions that change from time to time, so be sure to check the current Google Guidelines here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177.

Organic geotargeted results

If your business doesn’t have a physical location in a community and can’t have a Google My Business profile there, it will not be able to appear in local pack listings. However, your web pages can still show up in the regular organic results for local and geotargeted queries. Search engines display organic results below the local pack results, and often one or more organic results appear above the local pack as well.

In a nutshell, the way to show up for geotargeted organic results is by creating content relevant to the search query that’s also optimized for the geographic location. This is a large part of what we call local SEO.

Create local landing pages

There’s a right way and a wrong way to create content for local searches. One wrong approach is to just list a bunch of city names or ZIP codes in a text block, hoping to rank for those terms. But users won’t like it, and the search engines might suspect spam and hit you with a ranking penalty.

Another wrong method is to generate a hundred copies of a web page and then use a find-and-replace method to substitute a different city name on each page. That approach creates thin, mostly duplicated content that’s likely to attract a penalty from Google’s Panda algorithm and damage your site’s rankings. (See Chapter 2 in this minibook for more on Panda and the need for unique, quality content.) This type of find-and-replace approach also doesn't convince your users or the search engines that you really can do business in those locations.

So what should you do? The right way is to create unique, original content for each location where you want to do business. It depends on your site structure and goals, but consider devoting specific pages to locations and then talking about what you do in that location throughout the text. For each local landing page (the page where you want a searcher to land when clicking through to your site), do the following:

• Mention the location. In your landing page Title tag, body text, and possibly also in a heading tag on the page, mention the name(s) of the local city or cities this page focuses on. You might have one page about your classic car services for Poughkeepsie, another for Detroit, and so on.
• Include conversational local modifiers. Beyond the place name itself, searchers may indicate that they’re looking for something local using words such as “near me,” “nearby,” and “neighborhood.” These words that signal interest in location-specific results are becoming increasingly common as searchers speak queries into mobile phones. Sprinkling in conversational local modifiers near your keywords may make sense, with phrases like “Looking for car customization near your Brooklyn neighborhood?”
• Talk about things related to the location. Don’t just give the city name; instead, also mention geographic terms related to it, as you would naturally in conversation. For instance, if you’re establishing that you do business in Los Angeles on a given page, you can also include “Hollywood” or “sunny Southern California” in the text.
• Make it unique. Think creatively about ways to vary the content on each local landing page. Here are a few ideas to get your brainstorming started:
  • Show local customer testimonials.
  • Include descriptions and pictures of work you have completed in that city.
  • Talk about local events your company attended or sponsored.
  • Offer a city-specific special (could rotate between cities).
  • Publish photos you took in the city or a video you created there.
  • Talk about information that’s specific to that city, such as local regulations, data, weather, statistics, history, events, people, places, or other facts relevant to your business.

If you have a blog, use the preceding list of ideas to stimulate geotargeted blog posts as well. For instance, you can write a blog post about an auto show in Detroit that showcased lots of great classic cars. Link from the blog post to the appropriate local landing page to give it added support.

Answer common questions

Put yourself in local people’s shoes who might be looking for a business such as yours. What do they need? Local searches are often performed by people using a smartphone or other mobile device. What kind of questions would mobile users be asking?

For example, if you have a restaurant, a person living nearby who looks up your restaurant might want to know your address, directions, payment types that you accept, hours you serve lunch and dinner, and your menu options. Design your site to provide all that information, and make it easy to see and navigate through for mobile users. Further, consider personalizing your content with scenarios a local person might relate to. For instance, if a theater is down the block from your restaurant, you might talk about theatergoers coming to your restaurant before a show, or the ease of making a reservation for a relaxing dinner after the show, just half a block up beautiful downtown Main Street. Think of scenarios you can write that connect questions users have (for example, Do you take reservations? Where can we go eat after a show?) with local geographic terms (such as the theater and Main Street) in an engaging way.

Make sure that your website answers the questions local searchers ask. Doing so makes your site relevant for local search results and attracts more satisfied customers. Remember that people are searching more and more using mobile devices, and the majority of mobile searches have local intent. For that reason, mobile and local are inescapably linked. If you want to rank in local search, make your site mobile-friendly, by all means. For help making your site mobile-friendly, see Book IV, Chapter 3.