Yahoo Offers Local Search Tips
Anytime a search engine rep. hands out SEO/SEM advice, I think it’s generally worth listening to. I did my best to get some local SEO advice from Yahoo’s Brian Gil when I interviewed him a couple months ago. Be sure to read that if you missed it the first time around.
Now, another Yahoo rep, Nick Patsiopoulos of Yahoo! Canada, shared some local search advice this week at SES Toronto. Here’s Nick’s six tips for local search success:
- Accurate data and information
- Have listings on multiple services
- Offer multilingual listings
- Enhance your content
- where applicable offer customers the ability to interact with ratings and reviews of your service
- finally, a strong merchant website
Interesting that having a web site is at the bottom of the list, isn’t it?
Nick’s comments came during the local search panel at SES Toronto. You can read Lisa Tarticchio’s recap of the entire session on the aimClear blog.
It surely backs up the assumptions of the contributors in our recent survey doesn’t it — website was a distant second to LBL information. Listings on multiple services is becoming increasingly important as well. Would love to hear more about folks’ experience with Localeze, I hear they are getting more involved with Yahoo daily. Greg Sterling also just wrote about today about them syndicating to yet another service…
Could part of the reason that you don’t need a website to rank well in the local listings be that Yahoo and Google feel that they want to lower the barrier to entry.
By making it easier to get on line you promote the medium of local search. This in terms makes it a useful product faster for users and for businesses. What happens after this market matures a little bit for Google and Yahoo? I think they see the maturing of this market as the way they make their money. Get them hooked on great local listings and then they start spending money in other ways.
I think that’s exactly what it is, Tim. They’re very interested in lowering that barrier, as you say. And yes, I think they know that once they get a small biz online and seeing traffic from search, it stands to reason that the small biz will become a loyal customer of other products and services. The engines are smart to go at it in this way.
David – it does complement the Local Search Ranking Factors quite well indeed!