Local Search Engine Optimization Services

Does Your Business Offer Goods or Services to Your Local Community?

Perhaps you own a restaurant or hotel, a florist shop or landscaping firm. Perhaps you're a therapist, a lawyer, an auto mechanic or a dog walker. If you have something to offer to your community and you want your neighbors and regional tourists to be your customers, you need Local Search Engine Optimization.

What is Local SEO?

Performing Local SEO involves a combination of on-page and off-page efforts. This means Solas Web Design will go through your website page by page, ensuring that each page is making it abundantly clear to both your human visitors and search engine bots that you offer your goods/services in your local area. We perform keyword research to discover how people are using search engines to look for the types of things you offer, and then we set about reflecting this information in the title, header and meta description tags, as well as the main text copy of your website.

At this point, we may also be suggesting some redesign work of your existing website in order to make it more usable for human visitors or more crawlable by search engine bots. We may also recommend that your business develop some new, helpful pages on your website in order to make the most of the fact that you do business within your local community.

Don't have a website but know you need one? Solas Web Design is ready to develop a website for your business from the ground up. We offer 8 years of experience building user-friendly, appealing, search-engine-friendly websites for small businesses across the U.S. Once your website has been locally optimized, our second step will be to walk you through getting your business registered with some of the Internet's most important local entities such as Google's Local Business Center, and Yahoo! Local. At this point, we may have other suggestions to make for what we feel will help your business achieve maximum local visibility, based upon the specific niche your business is in.

What Are Local Search Engine Rankings And Why Do You Need Them?

When you go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo! and type in a query along the lines of dentist, san francisco, CA, you are performing a local search. Your intent is obviously to find a dentist in San Francisco. In many cases, performing a search like this will bring up two kinds of results for you in Google or Yahoo!

In Google, you will be shown both organic results and also the local results being pulled from Google's Local Maps entity:

In Yahoo!, you will be shown both organic results as well as results pulled from Yahoo! Local:

You need to make efforts to work toward having your company's website appear for relevant goods/services in your local area in both the organic and local results so that customers looking for what you've got to offer will find you! Solas Web Design will be your guide to making the right efforts to achieve maximum visibility for these important local types of searches.

It has been estimated that some 50% of searches being performed these days are local in nature. If your business is local, you need to be found where these people are searching!

If You've Just Heard About Local Search, Chances Are, You Have Some Questions:

• How do I get my business to appear in Google Maps?
• What and where is Google's Local Business Center?
• Google already has my business listed, but I didn't register it - how do I take control of my local business listing?
• How do I make changes to my local business listing?
• How do I add photos or videos to my local business listing?
• Why do some businesses show up in the organic listings for local searches while others don't?
• How do I get my customers to leave me reviews and give me stars?
• How do I change the category I'm listed in by Google's Local Business Center?
• How does Google rank local businesses?
• How do I get good local rankings for my business?

There's a lot to learn, and because Google is constantly refining its algorithm, (the process by which it determines the relevance of web documents to users' searches) we are always learning. Solas Web Design is here to answer the questions you have about local search, and to assist you in taking control of your local business listing so that it reflects the most important data about your company.

If You're Used to Paying Hundreds or Thousands of Dollars A Month For Yellow Pages Advertising, You're In For A Pleasant Surprise

Yellow Pages have been historically able to demand top dollar for advertising because they had created a kind of monopoly. When people needed to find a local hair salon, carpet cleaner or toy store, they opened up the phone book. If you weren't in there, you were nowhere, with foot traffic being your only hope for survival.

Where we live in the SF Bay Area, a full page color Yellow Pages ad requires a monthly investment of about $7500.00. At the end of the year, this adds up to an investment of $90,000.00!

Times have changed.

The small business websites we develop cost a fraction of this for a multiple-page, absolutely full color website for which you pay once and own forever. Your investment for our Local Search Engine Optimization Services is, frankly, going to look like peanuts to you if you have been advertising with traditional Yellow Pages.

Over the past couple of years, both of the Internet's major search engines - Google and Yahoo! - have developed their own local directories, and as computers have become a part of daily life for the majority of Americans, use of the Internet to discover local goods and services has risen every year.

Does this mean it's time to abandon your costly YP advertising? Not if the investment is showing you a good return. But, you need to prepare your business for the future of local advertising and that is going to be happening on the Internet. By getting Local rankings now for your business, your company will not be left behind.

How Does Local Search Differ From Yellow Pages Advertising?

At this point in the game, local Internet technologies are new. They are constantly changing and developing to meet Internet users' needs. What you get with traditional advertising is a guaranteed placement for a given sum of money. You get what you pay for.

Local Search efforts are different. We do not control the algorithms that determine how search engines rank local businesses. You do not pay Google or Yahoo for a guaranteed placement in their results. It doesn't work like that, unless you intend to enroll in one of their pay-per-click programs, which is more like traditional advertising.

In Local Search, it's all about the work you do with your website and the work you do to promote your website. It isn't about paying an advertiser, and there are no hard guarantees like the ones you may be used to with YP.

You hire Local Search specialists like us to work for you in getting your website into compliance with Local Search best practices and to consult with you about the best methods of promoting your local business. This is the monetary investment that goes into Local Search but the real power is in the efforts invested, not the payments made.

Does Your Local Search Engine Optimization Service Provider Need To Be Local To You?

Absolutely not. The Internet allows us to take on national clients. We work with small businesses across the U.S. The Internet allows you to hire the specialist who is the best match for your business, regardless of location. Get the best for this very important work.

How You Will Benefit From Working With Solas Web Design

Small business owner education is our #1 commitment. We will explain to you exactly what we are doing, and why we are doing it so that you come away from working with us feeling confident about how Local Search works and how it relates to your business.

After an initial contract of work has been completed, we remain available to our Local Search clients for hourly consultations or additional work whenever you need it. We have developed lasting business relationships with our small business clients over the years and pride ourselves on the prompt, respectful services we provide.

Solas Web Design is a small business, and because of this, we understand small businesses. We are a husband and wife team, and you will always be speaking to one of us directly about your needs. We do not outsource projects, and we do not route our valued customers through hired reception desk answering services. By working with us, you can be confident that we know what is important to your company because we are the ones working directly with you.

Though Local Search is only a few years old, it is rapidly being adopted as consumers' easiest and most preferred way to find local goods and services. By acting now, you are doing exactly what you need to do to ensure that your business is taking advantage of the evolution of how people seek local businesses.

We are eager to learn about your business, what makes your company useful to your community, and to put our skills at your service so that your business is getting the local attention it deserves.

Learn more about Solas Web Design by reading the Local SEO category of our industry-recognized blog. Start reading.