Five tips to maximize the long tail of local search by Daniel Bower, 12 February 2008
Local search is fast becoming the most exciting search vertical on the web. Recent research by the Kelsey Group reported that 70% of Americans consult the web before making local buying decisions, while 36% of search engine queries now request local results.
By exploring local search, small business owners and marketers can benefit from both direct lead generation and general brand awareness. Brushing up your local keyword research skills is the place to start.
Key points
- Know your geography and all the local place names
- Make sure you note landmarks and places of interest that you can include in your copy
- Include niche terms in your web copy
- Find local business directories and review sites - they're invaluable for getting your site noticed
- Use web analytics to keep an eye on how people are finding your site.
Local search presents huge long tail opportunities; the range of keywords, and the variations of those keywords that can land someone on your page are vast. Take for example our site welovelocal.com. In the short term after our launch, 96% of non-paid keywords had just a single visit.
While developing www.welovelocal.com we’ve learned a fair bit about the intricacies of local search. These tips are for anyone working, or looking to work, within the local space; be it ways to help flesh out your site's content for good natural listings, or ways to research keywords for an effective paid search campaign.
Know your local geography
Geography can be a pain - in fact, it can be a nightmare. Despite what it may say on a map there is always more than one name for a single place - there are probably more like ten. While one keyword may get the bulk of the traffic, it's guaranteed that there are others worth scooping up.
Spend time on any available local resource you can, researching all the variations - Wikipedia can be a surprisingly valuable starting point - but we found just pointing on a map and asking people you know to be equally helpful. For example, while doing a bit of research in a small part of north London we were given a list of six different names to call it - suffice to say we now cater for them all.
Find local places of interest
You want to be able to scoop up those people searching who aren’t too knowledgeable about an area. In this case you’ll want to make sure you have all the most recognizable landmarks covered. Get out a travel guide (or just search for one) and cover the popular tourist spots. This works for big parks, stadiums and transport hubs too. If people congregate there in the real world, you want to make sure it’s part of your strategy.
For example, in London we were keen to capture those searching for “restaurants near Buckingham Palace” or “hotels near Hyde Park”. It’s more time-consuming than “London” but worth it in the long run.
Work around the category
If you’re managing a number of different types of local businesses, it’s important to make sure that you cover the broader category terms. While generic terms such as 'bars' and 'restaurants' may get the lion's share of the traffic, you’ll benefit from including niche terms too.
Indian, Kosher and Middle Eastern Restaurants may all have substantially lower yields but combined will help bulk up your campaign - while this may seem like an obvious point you’d be surprised how many people overlook this.
Needless to say, time-intensive keyword research such as this is best aided with tools such as Wordtracker. Not only will it help you pull out the more popular terms that even the best of us miss out, it will also help you pick up all the misspellings too, which, when dealing with such a large keyword base, can be a particularly challenging task.
Use review sites and business directories
It goes without saying that a business owner/marketer should ensure they have maximum visibility in the various review sites and local business directories.
In the US these sites include Yelp, Insider Pages and Angie's Lists, but also the much smaller sites such as the excellent Lawrence.com. These sites provide an invaluable source of local data which can help you research fresh keywords. Spend time examining the way they are structured, the terminology they use and, where possible, the language used in the reviews.
Search around the smaller areas you wish to target and find community forums and niche sites - establishing the local issues which face your audience can be a great way to grab attention.
Feed web analytics data back into your campaign
No matter how comprehensive your campaign is, there will still be people who discover your site using keywords you never would of thought of - it’s the beauty of local search. Make sure you have your analytics tools running and are keeping a close eye on any keywords that start to bubble up. Make sure you’re reporting daily, rather than weekly or monthly, otherwise the small changes are likely to be lost in a sea of data.
Research from Hitwise earlier this month reported that small businesses rely on search engines now more than ever before - it’s a trend that is only going to increase as SMEs see the lead potential of local search. It’s yet another reason to hone your local keyword research skills.
For another article on homing in on the long tail, have a look at Wordtracker's Three Good Reasons to Target the Long Tail.
About Daniel Bower
Daniel Bower is Project Manager at eMomentum the makers of welovelocal.com a local business directory for the UK.
27 comments
Local search has proven to be very effective for my company and clients. In many instances it is impossible to get in the top three listings for non local terms. Competing for these terms will often generate no traffic, whereas getting to the top on local key phrases will generate some traffic. Furthermore, it is typically easier to close deals when you can have face-to-face contact. This makes the local searchers higher quality customers.
Nice article. Local search even plays a role with ecommerce sites like ours whereby often people will look of local webtogs shops in their area or try things like "keen boots near Dorking"..
Great tips about local places of interest and the multiple ways of referring to localities. It will be interesting to see if search engines increasingly try to use this sort of location-related information themselves to improve the relevance of their results.
This is indeed an exciting area of search (perhaps reflected in Google's recent move to include up to Google Local listings in results of local searches).
I agree completely that local search is the way to go! Once I revamped both my websites to include landing pages by location my traffic doubled on one website and let's say the other site had exactly 30 keyphrases in January 2007 and in January 2008 I had exactly 1500 keyphrases. You do the math - enormous web traffic explosion.
Much of what we do revolves around local. Like you said, knowing the local geography is very important for search. Not many people know what the "front range" is but a lot of people in Colorado do. Same can be said about just about every locality.
Great article, well written. We'll link to our from our blog if that's ok.
I like to comment on the part on using web analytics to find long tail keywords. One thing about that is that it can become crumbersome looking through all those keywords.
After all, how would you know which keyword is a good target for long tail optimization?
One tool that I used is hittail which gives you long tail recommendations based on the keywords people are finding your site.
Local search to increase our visibility...I like it, this is truly much needed info
Thanks Raja
Very helpful article Daniel. I agree using community names/common place names helps define your search.
@Martin Lee I agree that using Analytics tools to trawl through a mass of keywords can be a pain but I think it it time worth spent.
Drilling down through you keyword data will often find little gems that you never knew you ranked for - and thus new areas to focus your link building another search engine strategy on.
Fine article, thanks! One of the key things, I think, is that people innately trust local people and businesses - rightly or wrongly; they might also favour supporting a local community, and perhaps also when purchasing get a greater sense of safety if a local supplier is chosen. I am sure your article will be read by thousands because you've hit the nail on the head with your website design.
Long tail keywords are crucial when working with localized business ventures. We specialize in Real Estate and as you would guess location plays an important part of that. Check out this article that I found on the same topic: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/articles/2008/0212c.html pretty much sums it up.
"Very helpful article Daniel. I agree using community names/common place names helps define your search"
i do too.
Well done piece of work. A lot of my clients have markets in a specific location and the suggestion to use Wikipedia revealed some local directories I hadn't found.
Thanks for this nice article. I worked on a little research for local search queries last week and I found very interesting aspects:
Long tail keywords are crucial when working with localized business ventures. We specialize in Real Estate and as you would guess location plays an important part of that.
Drilling down through you keyword data will often find little gems that you never knew you ranked for - and thus new areas to focus your link building another search engine strategy on.
Local + long tail is niche of niches. Greater than the 1 search phrase that gets all the traffic are the many searches that get each only a few visits. For analytics on a daily basis, we run Clickening. For the long tail, check out Hittail. And always use at least 3 analytics apps for comparison.
Very helpful article Daniel. I agree using community names/common place names helps define your search.
Great article Daniel. Thank you.
While one keyword may get the bulk of the traffic, it's guaranteed that there are others worth scooping up.
Great article, how do you approach smaller businesses?
Local search is great because it tends to generate visits from more highly motivated buyers rather than browsers. eg. I would argue someone searching on "Sydney awnings suppliers" would be more motivated than someone just searching on "awnings". Thanks for the post.
Thanks for a great article. It got me thinking about a few new things that I haven't tried yet. Directories and local search engines have definitely helped our traffic. Also optimizing our sites for location have also been a good move. I'm finding that being listed on Merchant Circle has helped our rankings and our Merchant Circle page also seems to rank high for various keywords.
Thank you for this article. In my opinion the long tail is a very powerful way to generate targeted traffic for a website. And the optimization of the local search long tail is espacially for websites with local based business more than important.
Thank you for sharing your expertise Daniel. Having worked with small to medium size businesses for over 7 years now I have also found it beneficial to generate links from the local sites that rank high for the geography names you are trying to target (Online Newspapers, Chamber of Commerce, etc).
Drilling down through the keyword data will bring about a few golden nuggets for sure. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!