Struggling to beat out your competitors on a national scale is tough to do – taking them on locally ain’t so tough!
You just have to know what to do.
Optimizing your content, but especially the markup of your page, is crucial to succeeding in dominating your local search results.
GeoRSS
Adding semantics to your page puts you leaps and bounds ahead of your competition (in most cases). geoRSS is great because it’s SO sepecific.
Example: Your company services 10 surrounding cities. Create a page specific to each of those cities and explain why your service is helpful to that city in particular. Add some GeoRSS meta tags to the header and now search engines know exactly what is meant to be going on.
Benefit: Search engines pick up on the standard keyword phrases that signal it to be about a certain geographic area but at the same time they are certain which area it is about because of the GeoRSS tags. AND there are lots of sites out there that crawl the web looking for GeoRSS tags so they can aggregate local news, entertainment, and companies and display them on hyperlocal dashboard-like sites. Make it easy for them!
GeoRSS also has a WordPress plugin called GeoPress that makes blogging and local optimization a breeze. Check it out.
Duh, Use Your Address
Put your company’s address somewhere on every page of your site. Google can be certain they’re plugging you into the right locality if you provide them it.
Business Search Engine Submission
Make sure you manually submit as much information about your site as possible to Google, Yahoo!, Live, and Yelp so they can return your company as a result in local searches.
Other Options
outside.in outlines a few more methods of making known local connections your page has. They suggest linking to a Google map even, or just categorizing or tagging your content with a zip code. SEO Igloo Blog has some copyrighting tips to help and so does James Harrison. HyperLocal Blogger outlines some strategy.
Related posts:
Great post about GeoRSS! At outside.in, we talk about it almost exactly the same way…as the SEO for hyperlocal. To offer an update on your last paragraph, outside.in also offers GeoToolkit, which automatically GeoTags your RSS Feed and makes it a GeoRSS Feed. You and anyone who is interested in tackling the hyperlocal market can check it out at http://outside.in/toolkit. Once you GeoRSS-ify your feed at outside.in, you can also pick up a nifty StoryMap to embed on your site.