Search Engine Local Search

Looking for a restaurant to kick alive your taste buds? New to the place, need to locate your bank at the closest distance from your apartment? Want to know about the sports club in your locality? People don’t remember the offline methods to get the answers to these; and why should you when Internet is at your disposal to give the same if not better and more results, quicker.

The World Wide Web search or online yellow pages and other such directories are popular ways for people searching about necessities from schools to shopping and more. These return quick and great results for your queries. But when it comes to finding more accurate results for your location, the situation gets problematic. These engines are not able to do justice, not because they do not have the resources or the information, but because they have excess of it.

But search engines are now tackling this problem by introducing a new feature – the local search. Google, Yahoo and other top players have entered this race already by getting their local search activated.

So what is a local search? What does this mean to your business? How can you leverage the local search of Google and Yahoo to build your business? This article will help you understand these points.

What do you mean by Local Search?

Local search is a search service offered by search engines that helps you locate businesses in a specific geographical location. This helps you find simple businesses like a beauty salon within walking distance from your apartment.

For local search, the user needs to mention the type of business and the geographical location (City/State) that he is looking to find the business in and lo behold! A fancy new restaurant a couple of miles away from your home, or a cool gym next door that you didn’t know about show up here!

Many search engines have introduced this concept of local search with the leaders Google and Yahoo fighting it out. The most fabulous feature about such a search is that not only do they give you details about the businesses you are looking for; they also give you a mapped result with directions for driving! The engines also add reviews to the businesses to help you make better choices. While Google uses a color-coded scheme for their reviews, Yahoo uses the traditional star format for reviewing.

The Local Search Process

Local search could be called a mixture between directory listings and World Wide Web search. The content of the 10 billion or more web pages available online today is searched and the result is combined with the information provided by yellow pages and other online directories and a comprehensive geographically specific result is returned. This is the way most of the top local searches work.

While search engines use the city name as a filter criterion, more specific and refined results are given by asking the user to choose the distance from their current location. For example, if a user wants to know a hospital closest to his house, he only needs to mention the distance like 5 miles or 3 miles to get the most accurate results. Search engines have many more ways of refining your search process as they compete to give you accurate and best results for your query.

Listing in Local Searches

Search engines pick up your business from the existing World Wide Web pages and/or directory listings to show you up in a local search result. But the large number of pages existing and the relevancy factor being crucial, your business may be left out. It is therefore in the best benefit of both the engines and you, the engines for they would want to return the best results and you for you would want to get traffic that is likely to give you business, to get your site listed in the local searches. You could just go and submit your web page(s) to the engines; visit the Local Business Center of Google https://www.google.com/local/add/login to get your business listed there.

Criteria for Ranking in Local Searches

Just the way World Wide Web search ranking is important to you, the local search ranking is important too. Ranking criteria for local search is more complicated because besides relevancy, here the distance is also an important criterion. Both these factors combined gives a local search result.

Your Business and Local Search

Local search is proving to be a boon to not only the search engines who have seen a phenomenal spurt in the traffic but also to the visitors who can now get all the information they need in just a click as against the scores of pages they otherwise need to browse through. It has also proved to be big help to the local businesses. Whether you have a restaurant, a grocery shop or a small bookshop, you'll stand to gain by getting your business page listed. This simply means more exposure and more highly targeted traffic. People with definitive need for your service, closest to your physical infrastructure are the ones who are going to view your page and hence it means that if you have what they are looking for, they'll be right there in your place.

Positioning Your Local Business on Top

The obvious question is how do you get your business right there on top. Simple, if there is an optimization technique for World Wide Web page ranking, why not use it to get on top in a local search ranking.

What next?

Fill in our contact us form to know how Nabler can help. It would be our pleasure to assist you in making your business succeed.

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