Where the hell are you?
Location
Location
Location
The location of your business is getting more important - and here's why:
It's about search
Google knows where you are; well it knows the IP address of the computer from which you connect to the internet and this will give it a zip code to work with. This is a good thing, if you’re searching for a divorce lawyer in San Francisco you don’t want to see results from Boise, Idaho.
But when you search from your “immobile” workstation, either at your office or at home, the search results don’t really factor in your proximity to the business location. Search results reflect all the usual suspects – great quality content, number of links and social shares, on page SEO, etc, etc.With mobile it's different
When you search on your mobile phone, location plays a far more important factor – in fact a study last year showed that desktop and mobile results can differ by as much as 86%.
It's about smart phones
The old mobile phones weren’t terribly useful when it came to accessing the internet, but the arrival of the smart phone changes all of that. A report from Nielson showed that as of February 2012, 50% of all the phones in America were smart phones – and you can bet that the percentage is a lot higher for people who need your services.
So – as more people become mobile, as more people access the internet from different locations, the whole construct of proximity becomes more important to search results
What you need to do
You need to increase the size of your local digital footprint, this means having entries for your business on the following platforms:
- Google+
- Google places
- Yelp
- Foursquare
- Local Directories
If you don’t have the time to do this, get in touch and Simply Friday can do it for you, or if you want to develop a local strategy, reply to this email and book a session.