Local Search And Location Based Advertising

 

Local Search And Location Based Advertising Local Search And Location Based Advertising If your a local business, most likely your already listed on one of these Location-Based Social Media Sites.

 

The question is, do you care what people are saying?

Location-Based Services are sites like: Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Google Places, Yelp and Brightkite. LBSs allow members to connect with others based on their current locations. In most cases, people use their smartphones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry) to check in to businesses like restaurants, bars and stores they visit.

 

These locations are then broadcasted to their online friends.​Because each check-in is broadcasted to a users friends, theirs natural word-of-mouth advertising that occurs through the site.If users see their friends check-in to a location, they're more likely to visit.

 

Sites like Foursquare and Facebook Places allow businesses to run specials that are unlocked by users who check-in to their locations. For example, a pizza place could create a special that gives free breadsticks to customers who check in five times. These specials encourage frequency, first-time visits and competition among customers.

 

 

Use microdata for your address

 

Especially here the use of microdata can be very efficient. Search engines love them, because they can understand them so easily. An idea could be to repeat your location on every page in a footer region, including microdata. You could do so using a custom HTML module, using the following piece of code as a template:

 

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"> <span itemprop="name">Your business here</span><br> <span itemprop="streetAddress">Your address here</span><br> <span itemprop="addressLocality">Your city here</span>, <span itemprop="addressRegion">Your State here</span> <span itemprop="postalCode">Your postal code here</span><br> <span itemprop="addressCountry">Your country here</span> </div>

 

Google Places

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Registering your site with Google Local is a another great way (a must!) to put your site higher up in the rankings for shoe shops locally. You have a great chance of showing up on a result page with a marker on a Google Maps image, like this example for Iphone stores in New York:

 

You can register your shop at www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness. You can further enhance your listing with additional data like opening hours, your logo etc, while you can also connect a dedicated Google+ page for your listing. 

 

Other means for local promotion

 

For local SEO there are quite a few opportunities that you can easily use to promote your site. While usually linkbuilding can be very hard work, there are many resources specific for business listings that you can quite easily register for, giving you a link: some nofollow, but mostly a real follow-link. If you search the web for business directory, either globally or restricted to your country, you will usually find many.

The best known is often the Yellow Pages site. You will have to pay for this one, but there are also many that often free listing, or a basic listing. Just a few to get you started:

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• Bing Places

• Yellow Pages

• Yelp.com

• Local.com

• Hotfrog.com

• Yahoo small business directory (paid)

• Superpages.com

• Mapquest.com

• Angies list

• Manta.com

• And many, many more...