May

When Localized Search Engine Optimization Helps

By Sid

Yesterday I was doing a web site review of the 15th fastest growing private company in Oregon. It’s a business that’s been around for four years, and from what I could tell hasn’t updated their web site since they created the business. The company is a recruiting firm who specializes in “creative” jobs – graphic design, web design, and the like. It’s a nice looking web site with lots of pretty pictures and appealing colors.

The problem from a marketing (lead generation) standpoint is that it was obviously designed by a creative designer and not a marketer. The entire web site is built with Flash, a popular tool amongst designers, but useless as far as SEO and marketing are concerned.

There’s quite a bit I can say about the site, and will once I’ve completed my assessment. The one thing that stood out, though, is a topic that’s not often discussed, but is critical for a business like this.

Their business is localized to the Portland area, so why shouldn’t their web site also be localized?

What is Localized SEO?

Imagine that you are a graphic designer looking for a job in the Portland area. You’re thinking, “I want a job in Portland as a graphic designer.” You’re not thinking any old graphic design job anywhere in the world, but here in beautiful Portland. You’re creative, not technically savvy, though. So, you do a search for “graphic design jobs”. The result yields thousands of results, most of which are in the Bay Area, New York, or Los Angeles. Yuck.

You’re a smart person, so you refine your search to “graphic design jobs in Portland”. Ahh…. there you go. Most of the top search results are agencies, which isn’t a bad thing, as you’re certainly not opposed to working through an agency.

Our “creative employment agency”? Not to be found anywhere in the first 30 pages of Google… for ANY relevant search term.

That’s localized SEO: optimizing your web site for the kinds of searches your prospects actually perform.

Advantages of Localized Search Optimization

Less competition. Since few companies bother to optimize their web sites for localized searches, you’ll be more likely to come out on top if you do even just a few tweaks.
More targeted results. You won’t get folks from Southern California applying for your job openings, and the companies who hire your clients will know that you’re the exact company they want.
It helps your other search rankings. In my experience, if the search engines find that your site provides value to the end user (they stay on the site longer, click on your links, and interact with you), they’ll give you a higher ranking for other related keywords. (Disclaimer: this is merely my observation and my theory has not been properly vetted).

Because this particular web site was created entirely with Flash, they’d have to re-design the site to fully optimize it for localized search. If this is the case for your site, there is a viable option…

How to Optimize Without Changing Your Web Site

The company I’m reviewing also has a blog. They do about 1-2 new posts per month, again with no regards for the search engines. As far as I can tell, they get very little traffic to the blog and only created it because “we were told we needed a blog.”

What you can do is to create a blog that complements your web site, and that IS optimized for localized search. It’s much easier to optimize a blog because you can create categories for each of the major search phrases, and then add your localized phrase (“Portland”) to the blog posts. Trust me, the search engines will find you… AND if you take the time to write articles that are helpful to your target market, they WILL look you up.