Google has confirmed that the search engine is increasing its focus on local searches. In a recent blog post, Google Software Engineers Jenn Taylor and Jim Muller explained Google’s increased focus on local search, which has resulted in the search engine automatically pulling up local results by accessing the searcher’s IP address.

What does this mean for the average website? While the focus of the internet has become more global, the main conductor of site traffic has turned its eye to providing local results. This means that if you’ve managed the content of your site to make it more friendly to international visitors, you may lose some of your traffic.

Optimising for local search isn’t too difficult, and need not interfere too much with the strategies you have in place for global SEO. It’s best to seek advice from a consultant, such as SEO Consult, in order to ensure you don’t interfere with your existing SEO strategy, but there are a few things you can begin to consider when thinking about ‘localising’ your site.

So the search engines can perceive the different localities your site serves, it’s a good idea to separate out your ‘local’ information. For instance, if your business serves a few different locations, create a separate webpage for each.

In creating your ‘local’ pages, perform your regular SEO with geo-location modifiers. An example of this would be to add your location to your business – eg. ‘Curtains Galore in New York’ instead of just ‘Curtains Galore’. When you provide directions to your business, provide written instructions instead of just an image with a map. Remember, search engines rely on text, and the more local names you provide the more local your business will seem.

Once you have separated out your local information as much as possible, add any extra pages to your sitemap including your local tags. This makes it easier for search engine spiders to find the local information, and also adds to the density of local tags on your site.

To add to the ‘locality’ of your website, put up your business profile with local directory listings. This may not always be viable, for instance when you are a genuinely internationally-focussed site, but listings in major cities are always a good idea. Search engines use such sites to build up knowledge of how local a business is. Many local directories offer listings for free. Even better, local directory listings can help you to keep control of the top ten sites listed when your business name is searched, and help push your own site up in the rankings. Another, similar, way to boost your ‘locality’ and improve your PageRank at the same time is to acquire local reviews wherever possible.

If you do create separate pages for each of the localities your business serves, minimise content duplication by providing only essential information and linking back to your main page for further info. Duplicating any of your content could affect your PageRank.

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