Focus on local content
John Battelle reprinted a nice summary by Robert Peck of a Q & A session Google had yesterday. I'd like to focus on this statement:
Local Search is a Significant Portion of Their Business
This dovetails nicely with my own experiences. I hardly open the phone book anymore, for example. If I'm looking for my doctor's phone number, for example, I just enter “dr abcd, waterloo, ontario” into my Google toolbar and most of the times it gets it right off. If I'm looking for information about interest rates, I'll limit the search to Canada, because interest rates elsewhere don't help me figure out if I'm getting a good deal on my mortgage.
What does this mean for you? Well, instead of trying to get your pages to rank well for geographically-neutral topics, why not tailor your content for a specific country/region/city? Instead of writing a “mortgage tips” page, why not write a “San Francisco mortgage tips” page? A quick search on Google shows that “mortgage” by itself has 245,000,000 hits and “mortgage tips” has 268,000. (These are exact phrase searches.) However, “san francisco mortgage” has only 49,600 hits and “san francisco mortgage tips” has none. (You should, of course, also check these in Yahoo! and MSN to get a true picture.) So you can much more easily get a decent ranking for the more locally-oriented phrase than the general phrase. And your page still gets ranked for the general term. But you've targeted some local traffic. If you choose the right region (look at the trends for “mortgage tips”) then you might find yourself getting some choice traffic.
Not everything works on a local basis, of course, but there's a locality to many searches that is yours to exploit.
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.
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