Local search is a big thing this year in the world of SEO. As Google aims to provide more relevant and useful results to users, their algorithms will dig out structured information from sites and display them in the form of ‘snippets’ in their SERPs.
Rich snippets enable users to see a brief summary of information on a particular site, which will help them better determine whether or not that is what they were looking for.
An example can be see below, rich snippet highlighted showing a short summary which includes a review and a price range of Julie’s Darling Donuts.
One way you can help your business rank better in local searches is to make sure your company name and address is structured accordingly. Google can then grab this information and display results according to the user’s location as best as it can.
There are several markup formats which you can use to encapsulate and structure your already existing information in your html code; microformats, microdata and RDFa. Personally, I like using microformats as I find it most intuitive and easiest to implement. Ok, I’ve not actually tried the other two out so can’t really give an honest opinion, but microformats work for me and I’m happy with it so far :)
Say for example you have a car wash company and your html for the company information looks like so:
Google would not be able to extract any useful information from this as it’s not structured. Here’s what it looks like with microformats tags:
<div class=”vcard”> tells Google the the following lines describe a person, contact details or an organisation. <span class=”fn org”> lets Google know that the enclosed text is describing a company/organisation rather than a person. And as you can see, the remaining tags are self explanatory, and this is why I like microformats.
So try it out for yourself and add some structured information to your site today!
I like the article, it is sprightly, well written and I particulary like the the easy to follow format and also the fact that it possesses a fluvial quality of information. I look forward to reading some more articles like this in the future, my ownly critism is about the grammatical structure of one paragraph. If during a long sentence you are still climbing out of the trenches regarding information; then try using your secret friend the semicolon ‘;’ to help you get the message across. A pleasure to read nevertheless! D
Hi Julie,
Do you think Local search is really that important? i think it depends on the type of website.
Another thing is although Rich Snippets are good they do not always appear and so would say more of best practice than
helping with SEO.
Dennis
Hi Dennis,
To be honest with you, although I’ve seen various snippets of the review type, I’ve not spotted any examples of location based snippets in the search results as of yet; although I believe it’s just a matter of time.
The more prepared a site is for changes the better, which is why I am an advocate of best practice. An example of good practice is complying with W3C standards when coding – although we know it doesn’t play a role in the ranking factor YET, but by preparing yourself, you’ll be one step ahead when Google decides that it does indeed matter.
I think you’re right about local search being more important for certain types of businesses/websites. However, it is theoretically much easier to rank well for local searches, so ranking better locally can only be an added bonus for the site in question.
Thanks for your feedback,
Julie
My sites been hacked help me!!!
how do i get back into Google i have been thrown out.
pay good money!