A recent study by Chitika Insights found that nearly 25% of all searches done on Google are “local searches”, which means the user was looking for something in a particular geographic area (such as “Cincinnati inbound marketing agency” or “best pizza in Cincinnati”).

If you’re part of a company that does a great deal of its business locally, this statistic will have a lot of impact on you and your website.  It’s good news – it means that you can grab a significant share of organic search traffic for your business without having to battle for terms popular among others in your industry. How do you do that? Here are X keys to prepping your online presence for local organic search:

1. Create a Google+ Local Business Page – If you’ve claimed your Google Places page in the past, Google has already converted you over to a Google+ Local Business page.  If you haven’t been to your page in awhile, take the time to update it with the appropriate details such as a cover photo, business logo, etc.  If you haven’t signed up at all yet, you’ll need to head to plus.google.com/local to get it done. This step is important because Google uses the data from Google+ to serve up the most relevant search results for its users. So if you’re a pet grooming business in Cincinnati who has a Google+ Local page vying for search space with other groomers who don’t have +Local pages, you’ve got a leg up on the competition.
2. Include local keywords in your blog posts – You are blogging, right? If you’re not, get on that! But if you’ve already got a blog going, make sure you’re including local keywords in your posts that people searching for your business might use. If you’re a bar in downtown Cincinnati, for instance, you’ll need to find a way to use keywords like “downtown Cincinnati bars”, “bars near Great American Ballpark”, “bars near Paul Brown Stadium”, and the like.
3. Make sure your meta tags and page titles include local phrases – I’m not talking about “Who Dey”, “3-Way”, or “OTR”. I mean applying some of those keywords from #2 to the pages of your site.  Just make sure your page titles don’t exceed 60 characters and keep your meta descriptions to under 150-160 characters so that the web crawlers can easily read them and display them appropriately in search engines.
4. Make sure your “About Us” and “Contact Us” pages contain keywords related to the areas you service – A lot of folks like to tell the stories of how their company came to be on their “About Us” page, and that’s great! Just don’t forget to include your local keywords on these pages. Same goes for the Contact Us page.  If you’re providing directions to your business, it might also be a good idea to write out some simple directions from the places your customers most often come from.

So there’s a quick ‘n dirty rundown on optimizing your online presence to be found in local organic searches.  If you’ve got questions or need help working on this, contact us at 513-399-6333!