Forget Hyperlocal Google Goes Statewide With Local Search
Filed under: Local Search Optimization, Small Business Marketing, local search, local seo, seo
As much as I love all the hyperlocal buzz and things going more and more community focused I have reasons to love larger geographic regions as well, seems Google has some love for them too.
Over at SearchEngineJournal there was an interesting post analyzing Googles latest local search changes. Now they show local results for statewide searches, this is an interesting concept and one that I can already see ways to take advantage of for some of our customers.
Take a read of the linked post above, but here are a few quick tips they pointed out on how to take advantage of this:
- Check and see if your Industry and State are showing local listings.
- Make sure you aren’t stuffing location keywords into categories. If your category is city + keyword then what happens when someone does a search for state + keyword.
- Do keyword research for city vs. state terms. Your business might benefit by trying to go after one or the other.
- Look at citations from businesses in other areas of the state and see if you can use them.
I think number 2 is very important in this, in most cases people go straight to city level categories or keywords, but with Googles shift to show local search for statewide a business that is trying to take advantage of this is going to have to think a bit differently.
As a Geo Domain investor/developer, we target all levels: state, region, and city. I would imagine regions is next with popular region terms like:
Northern Virginia
HamptonRoads
Chicagoland
South Florida
Tampa Bay
Metroplex
Southern California
Northern California
North Jersey
South Jersey
down to rural regions like (VA examples)
Northern Neck
Roanoke Valley
Shenandoah Valley
New River Valley
Hey Bruce, thanks for the recap of my article. Sorry, It took me so long to comment on this but man, life gets busy. We had a very interesting discussion about statewide searches on sphinn following the article.
But, on another note I thought I would pass along that google is penalizing listings with city keywords in categories. So, be careful…a lot of listings have been falling.
Mike,
Thanks for the comment, I understand busy so no worries:)
Interesting on the categories with cities, something to take note of. Will have to review a few previous sites.
Thanks for the tip!
Bruce