Local Search Engine Optimization DOES Exist

An article by Lisa Barone titled “Local Search Engine Optimization Doesn’t Exist” has just the opposite title of this post. I like Lisa, she’s really nice, writes well, and contributes greatly to the industry. But I think she is wrong on this, but only wrong maybe because she hasn’t really ever stepped foot into true Local SEO.

In her article she mentions targeting city or region based keywords like “simi valley seo” and “simi valley optimization”. Sure that is “local SEO”, but there is so much more than just targeting keywords.

Major Differences between SEO and Local SEO

1) You don’t even need a website! Obviously the best situation is to have a website and make that a part of your Local SEO strategy, but businesses that don’t even have a website can benefit significantly from doing Local SEO.

2) Local Listing Submission and Optimization - Instead of optimizing on-page factors on your website, in Local SEO you optimize your local listing submission. You make use of the fields, categories, and text areas in local listings with Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, Yelp, SuperPages.com, etc and optimize them for the keywords your potential customers will use to search and find you. For example, if I owned a UPS store or FedEx Kinko’s, I’d want “post office” to be somewhere on my listing because people just looking to send a package don’t have to go to the post office, they could just hit your place if its closer. I did a search on my iPhone for “post office” today, and the only places that came up were actual post offices, when just up the street about 1/2 a mile is a UPS location.

3) Online Customer Reviews - This goes back to the whole reason I built LeaveFeedback.org, because online customer reviews are so critical. How about for your regular website SEO? Nope. Another example, I was doing some local queries (for a future post) and looked at the word “pizza” in a town I used to live in. The first listing that came up was also the most popular pizza joint in the whole town. Why? They had ONE customer review, and not a single other pizza place (out of over a dozen) had a review. Were they close to city center? Yes, but there were 3 other pizza places closer to city center. Were they alphabetical? Nope. They had ONE customer review.

4) On-Page Site Optimization - If a local business does have a website, there are many aspects to Local SEO that simply do not apply to regular SEO. For example, listing your address and phone number on every page and creating city/region/area specific pages of real content that align with local search queries.

So Lisa, it’s more than just keywords with a local area in them. Obviously this isn’t something a regular SEO can’t do, but it is a whole set of different strategies that need to be addressed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Local SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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