Web Marketing Strategy Update

With Google’s current (over?) emphasis on personalised search, the time is ripe for SMEs, especially those which sell goods or services within their own locality, to leverage local search options.

Google even provides some excellent tools to enable them to do so, in the form of Google Places and Google Apps, the latter currently a very much under-subscribed product.

Google Places

Google Places could be described as the online update of the Yellow Pages phone book. It offers businesses a “shop window” for free, with many extras. There is the opportunity to add a business description, photos, a map and most importantly, customer reviews of the business.
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The Google Venice update may not have attracted the same amount of attention as the Panda update did, but it has made some rather important changes to search engine optimisation, especially if you run a business which needs to rank well in local search results.

While most SEO experts are fixating on link valuation, the Venice update made a crucial change to local search results. The update note in question says:

“Improvements to ranking for local search results: [...] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal”
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Like many small businesses, yours may rely heavily on local customers. Just a few years ago, it didn’t really matter whether or not your site appeared in the search engine results for your local area. At that time, most people still flipped through the local yellow pages to find the services they needed.

Today things have changed dramatically. If your site isn’t ranking well for searches in your local area, you are almost certainly missing out on a lot of local business.

Simple Beginner’s Local SEO Guide

You don’t have to completely scrap your existing search engine optimization strategy in order to enjoy better local search rankings. In most cases, a few small, easy to make changes will have a big impact in how search engines view your site. It’s well worth it to implement these changes too. According to one survey, more than 60 percent of people who need local goods or services go online to find them. Incredibly, nearly 40 percent can’t find what they need! Put the these tips to use to ensure that local people can find your business online.
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