What is Local Search?

Local Search is the idea of associating your businesses online content with a particular geographical location or area. A quick example would be to search for food carts in a major city. When I search for “Portland Food Carts” links to food cart/truck websites come up in the search results. Google and Bing both place local (geo-based) results at the top of the first search results page. Those search results look something like this:

Local Search is somewhat related to (and can often be confused with) Localization (translating content to be relevant for a foreign languages/culture), Geo-targeting (providing content based on a user’s browser location settings), and Geo-location (the act of determining where a browser or mobile device is geographically located).

So why should a business care about this listing? Note the locations of the addresses and phone numbers in the above search results – it is an instant mapped based “yellow pages” type listing. On mobile devices being on this listing is even more important – the mobile devices can provide one click to a phone call or to a GPS based directions program.  In the early days of search the idea was to get your business content indexed as the most relevant content on the web. Several years ago, Google and other search engines begin trying to relate most relevant content to a specific real world locations. They figured out that users searching for tires in Seattle, WA did not want to find tire shops in San Francisco, CA.

Most businesses never even realize they can be proactive with targeting their content to a specific location. Businesses must be proactive with the indexing of their content, either take the lead as the authority for information on your business or Google’s Search Engine will try to do it for you.

So where do you start? See my post on improving your local search results.