Local SEO and Searches

I was reading an article the other day that nearly 49% of all searches done via Google are now localised.

With this in mind who is targeting there website to a local audience?

Although some markets dont have one local market are you missing a trick?

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Online Marketing Cheltenham | SEO Cotswolds

Personally, and feel free to shoot me down, but I reckon the majority of businesses were doing this already!

If I owned Bobs fish mongers in Bognor, and had a website, then pound to a penny I have been optimising for Bognor fish mongers for the last 5 years.

Unless you can service clients across the country, then the majority of small businesses would be marketing themselves locally anyway.

Just seems that google has caught up with the rest of us

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cheers Steve
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Urm yes and no I see what you mean but it's changed allot since say 3 years ago when people just used google to find information etc

I know I have always used Google to find local informaiton but I know that not everyone has.

I see what you are saying

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Online Marketing Cheltenham | SEO Cotswolds

The old advice to sort out where your customers come from, what types of people / organisations they are, etc is always relevant.

In our case, they're usually people who have to travel some distance to us (eg Londoners) or employers who want us to travel some distance to them!

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Yes, local listing also helps a lot for your business. You can do local listing by adding your website in local classified ads sites...

Google is doing their best to make the search experience as smooth and as easy as possible by providing more specific searches and making them more relevant whenever they can by playing with demographics and maps

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Jitendra Shah - Web design, SEO and New Media Solutions based in London

Well what ever Google might be up too, but what i have witnessed is that in order to get a website ranked up with in a local search engine, you website should be hosted with in the same region of the local search engine. Other wise preforming SEO could be very difficult.....

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I would have to strongly disagree, it may help a little, but it is not a contributing factor.

Local SEO is what I like to do, but local seo is more Google Places now.

I currently have a site that is top 5 in organic listings, and I dont really care that much about its organic rankings because its 1st on Google Places and its at the top. I get all the traffic I need and want to it.

This would probably apply to most people here, if you have an office or home that is in your area that you wish to rank for, then Google Places (if done right) is better than normal seo.

Can safely and categorically say this is 100% SEO myth.

People have been banging on about this for years, and its cobblers. We hosted MLS UK in Dallas for 3 years on dedicated boxes. Mainly because our UK experience was shocking.

We only reluctantly came back to the UK when transaction times became an issue. SEO and volume of traffic didn't make any difference.

Unfortunately, after burning through another crap UK hoster, we have ended up at Rackspace, where service seems to be on a par with what we had in the States.

But SEO and traffic, no difference. Its down to URL's, and country specific TLD, not geographic location. Or set it in WMT if you have a .com and only want UK traffic.

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cheers Steve
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localized searching is the present and future of google in my opinion. The idea is that someone in San Diego who plugs in a search for "family law attorney" probably doesn't want to see results for New York. So page one of the results is now split so it show half purely localized results and half normal organic. You should grab a local google places page for wherever your business is located if you are a local business or have a primary location. Optimizing for it is the challenge. The proximity of your address to the center of the city seems to play a role 9at least in Houston, Texas it does). Local Directories, organizations such as better business bureaus seem to matter..