Get Found! Practical Local Search @ SES
Posted by Lisa Tarticchio on June 18th 2008 in SES Toronto
At SES Toronto Local Search, while all the rage, is a hard nut to crack. Local search has many practical business applications that will help interested searchers find you close to home. Ian White, CEO of Urban Mapping got the party started by explaining the search pie and it’s implications.
40% of all search queries are inherently local, this is a substantial amount making it easy to understand why local search is so relevant particularly to smaller service based businesses. Candice Faktor, Creator of OurFavs and GM of Toronto.com drove this point home with her presentation which outlined the 4 areas she and her team have focused on in order to make OurFavs and Toronto.com a success. These four focal points include:
- Optimizing for Search Engines: Part of the success in this area is due to the age of the website itself, lending it more credibility in the eyes of Google. The team focus on the use of relevant title tags, descriptive copy, dynamically generated title tags, circular linking within the site, proper site architecture and finally quality links.
- Marketing: In short spending a lot of $$ on Google is smart while driving traffic to pages that do not naturally rank high is even smarter. Strategically driving traffic to pages using SEO is excellent but SEM drives deeper engagement than natural SEO content.
- Value Proposition: Particularly in the past few years there has been a spike in the number of local businesses seeking local search engine listings as part of their business strategy. This is largely due to the high ROI for those who have invested.
- Local Search Product: While servicing a local business market has it’s challenges in terms of a high cost for entrance, less sophisticated buyers, technology and outside competition there are many opportunities.
Enter…Nick Patsiopoulos, Product Manager at Yahoo! Canada who outlined the top ways in which people use local search.
- Non-Holiday Shopping inquiries
- Special Events information
- Local Restaurant’s
- Local services
Nick succinctly broke local search and searchers down into two main streams he calls, Research and Reference. Brilliant! Local tools are most used for merchant websites, web searches, and specialized local search. To be successful in local search you must have a few things:
- Accurate data and information
- Have listings on multiple services
- Offer multilingual listings
- Enhance your content
- where applicable offer customers the ability to interact with ratings and reviews of your service
- finally, a strong merchant website
User ratings and reviews are a very important part of the local activity process. The quantity of the ratings and the recency of the ratings lend credibility to your site or service and can also help move potential customers through the buying cycle. The reviews can be both positive and negative, a balanced approach helps to tell a complete story to those interested in your site and service.
Since as we know the vast majority of people who read user generated content are “lurkers” make sure that you make it easy to review you. Print your URL on receipts, offer discounts to those who do review you, provide detailed instructions, and reward reviewers…this reward can be as simple as a simple response to a review.
Lisa Tarticchio is a member of Search Engine People, a Toronto SEO and SEM firm whose mission it is to provide quality solutions that meet your business’s goals.
