Get­ting Started with Local SEO – Address Please

Local SEO (Search Engine Opti­miza­tion) refers to search opti­miza­tion with a regional focus, for instance tar­geting a city such as Van­couver.  An example of local search engine opti­miza­tion would be my web­site, Blender Design,tar­geting searches orig­i­nating in the Van­couver met­ro­pol­itan area. For a local busi­ness this means focusing SEO efforts to com­pete for the searches that matter most – poten­tial local clients.

I’m sure you’ve already noticed that search results are tai­lored to the searcher.  If a search engine, and by search engine I really mean Google, believes local search results would better answer a query, then local results will be pri­or­i­tized. For instance, if you do a Google search for “best restau­rant” you will likely see a couple of web­sites fol­lowed by a list of local restau­rants.  For many obvious local searches Google takes this a step fur­ther and includes an area map of results.

Get­ting Started with Local SEO – Address Please

As with all SEO cam­paigns you need to start with the basics, and there is nothing more basic for local SEO than ensuring that search engines know where you are located (e.g. your busi­ness, orga­ni­za­tion, event, person, place, or thing).  The eas­iest and most effec­tive way to do this is to pro­vide an address on your web­site.  Focus on:

• accu­racy – make sure the address you use locates you without con­fu­sion or error.  Check it in Google Maps and other online maps.
• con­sis­tency – choose a simple format and use it every­where, every-time.  This ensures search engines won’t divide their atten­tion across sev­eral sim­ilar results.
• stan­dards based – mark the ele­ments of your address so that search engines can’t make a mis­take. Tagged infor­ma­tion is called struc­tured data. More on this below…

Address For­mat­ting for local SEO – Struc­tured Data

Search engines will prob­ably get it right if you include your busi­ness address in your web­site in a simple format, but why take the chance?  Struc­turing the address data is easy(-ish) to do and Google might even reward you for your efforts.  Things are about to get tech­nical so some of you might prefer to share this post appropriately.

There are sev­eral ways you can mark up/structure/tag your address.  A pop­ular format is an hCard. Learn more at microformats.org. They also pro­vide a tool for cre­ating hCards. The hCard micro­format builds on HTML by spec­i­fying classes to add to tags wrapped around the ele­ments of your address.  The fol­lowing example of the sim­pli­fied hCard for Stephen Drozdik with Blender Design will give you an idea of what the output of the hCard tool can look like: