Local SEO and Searches

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

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

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!

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

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.

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..

Yes you are right, it isn't server location isn't contributing factor but it helps a lot in improving the existing rankings of your website present in the local search engine.

Submitting your listings with in Google is also a nice way in order to get your website link to the first page of Google. But remember this your website isn't going to be the only one present on those listings. Google Places would be having a complete list of websites with your competitors as well. Hence the effect of traffic would be a combined one. Hence that is the reason why your website's SEO is important.

I'd say unless you are wanting to buy something "online" such as from an ecommerce strore, or where the product or service comes from is irrelevant to you, then you will generally do a local search.