Local What?
Local what?
It is no secret that local search is one of the fastest growing sectors of this crazy organic search engine optimisation industry. Everyone has talked about it, including Google’s Matt Cutts and SEOBook.com Aaron Wall so it must be true!
A few days ago I did a short post titled, “Who uses a phone book?” and the funny thing was the next day we had a meeting with a Gold Coast Golf Resort GM and that exact point came up; “Who uses a phone book?”.
To start with I thought that they had been checking out our blog to see what we are about, well I was hoping anyway. Unfortunately, this was not the case, but the consensus is that the phone book is becoming an unwanted part of office furniture for local, state and national product and service providers.
Then I noticed that the good guys at SEOptimise issued a challenge on their blog to find a location (town, city, etc) that is not represented by Wikipedia In the top ten search results.
I thought this would be a good way to show just how important it is to consider the local search market, using Wikipedia search rankings as the example.
The first destination I searched for (Yamba, where I grew up) did not have a Wikipedia ranking in the top 10. Here are the search terms & results:
Search Term Wikipedia Ranking
Yamba 83
Yamba NSW >100
Yamba New South Wales 7
I know what you’re about to say, wiki is in the top 10 for the search term, “Yamba New South Wales”. True, but consider it from this point of view – the main market that will be searching for Yamba (and there is a lot) would be residents of Australia and therefore would use the state abbreviation when doing searches.
Here are the stats from the Google keyword tool:
“Yamba NSW”
880 (approx average search volume/month)
Competition 46,500
“Yamba New South Wales”
65 (approx average search volume/month)
Competition 3,390
So what does this all mean? If Wikipedia were in the business of selling holiday accommodation in Yamba through pay per click advertising and did not do any keyword research to local search patterns/terms they would be missing a lot of exposure and possible business by not bidding on “Yamba NSW”.
In natural search they may be able to rank higher for the long tailed keyword phrase, “Yamba New South Wales”, as there is less competition, but with their reputation in the www world they should be going after the more competitive search term, “Yamba NSW” for these two main reasons:
1 – Monthly search average shows that there are 13 times more searches for this phrase.
2 – Potential consumers for this market would use the state abbreviation, a great example of not knowing the search patterns of your target market and the importance of local search engine optimisation for certain industries.
Of course this may mean absolutely nothing if the search term does not convert, but that will be another blog post in the future.
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