Think Local, Act Local
I’d like to go a little bit more in depth of some of the points I made in my Yahoo Slurp post.
If you aren’t geographically optimizing your business website’s content for search engines, you could be screwing yourself out of new customers.
For demonstrative purposes, I’m going to rebuild a locally based business’s existing website, and have it properly optimized to begin getting traffic from both tourist/visitor (global) web surfers and locally based web users.
The business in question is an Authentic Mexican Restaurant in Redding, California. This restaurant is called Jose’s Taqueria. It has a website at the following URL: josestaqueria.com.
If it is anything like many locally based business websites, it will be done rather amateurish and contain the following ingredients:
(1) The homepage might mention the business name, and have a scan of the restaurant logo/sign.
(2) The menu will be simply scanned in, as a static bitmapped image.
(3) It might have a contact link, maybe an address and phone number.
(4) The page title’s will be generic, IE Jose’s Taqueria,
(5) No links pointing to it.
The intent is well meaning, yet is misses the mark. Their thought is that their Jose’s Regular clientelle will visit his site, hence making them come back more, and that maybe local people will look at the site.
Jose’s Regular clientelle isn’t going to remember a url, surfer behavior generally shows that most people will not remember the URL, but will remember to type in the business name in a search engine to find the site. This is fine, however, if there is a Jose’s Taqueria in every major city in the US, the chance of finding Jose’s Taqueria in Redding California is slim.
So what can we do to improve each aspect?
(1) The homepage should boldly state three things in plain text:
- - Jose’s Taqueria
- - Authentic Mexican Food
- - Redding California
This is the Who-What-Where template of business promotion. This should not put in fancy text, or imposed over a photo, it should be in plain HTML text, where it is readily visible and easily read. In fact, those should be the key points.
(2) Plain text that menu, Jose. Make than menu all HTML, as far as the text goes. Make sure that somewhere below the menu, you also have plain text mentioning that you are from Redding CA. Add some pictures of your food, that’s fine, but keep all of the menu items plain text. Perhaps someone is looking for a good Mexican Restaurant to eat at when they visit Redding next week. If Jose’s tamales include a special ingredient the surfer is looking for, Jose will stand out.
Keep those menus Plain Text
(3) The contact link is important, but it’s equally important to make sure that Jose has his contact information on every page. He is in Redding California. On California St. This is his phone number. That is where the tamale is hot!
(4) No way Jose, you are not a nationally recognized brand yet. You certainly aren’t a Baja Fresh or Taco Bell. You are Jose and you have a Taqueria named after yourself. Use that title tag. It should look like this
<title>Jose’s Taqueria - Authentic Mexican Food - Redding, California</title>
Title tags give search engines a good indication of what a web page is about, especially if it matches with the text content on the web page. If a web designer ever spends too much time making title tags look “cool” instead of being self descriptive, they should be beaten with a clue stick.
(5) If there is no website linking to Jose’s website, how is anyone going to know it is there? Search engines no longer need to be “submitted to”. They prefer to crawl links that from other pages. Even having just a few locally based sites linking to Jose’s, especially if using anchor text like “Redding’s Authentic Mexican Food”, or something like that.
Rebuilding the website doing these five very simple things should help josestaqueria.com go to work for him, both in producing new customers, as well as bring back the old ones.
A website is an investment, and an asset to to a business. It should always be treated as such. The goal as a local business website should always be WHO-WHAT-WHERE, WHO-WHAT-WHERE. Make those your watchwords, and a you too will see the profound impact that optimizing for local searches has.