[Bill]

I'm working on a site now that is national in scope but is really centered around several cities and areas. The topic itself is quite competitive so I figured that I'd be better served by targeting each city/area on a local scale.

Now for my questions... do you think this is a valid tactic to use? Also, do you know if Google checks the addresses that are placed on your site? For example if I posted the address of the St. Louis arch would I still get the "credit" (for lack of a better term) for being local even though that address is obviously is not mine?

I hope that this is helpful. If it leads to more questions than it does provide answers, that could be good, too.


Types of locations and misleading geographical location information

Some recent Microsoft papers discuss breaking down and trying to understand three different types of locations. I wouldn't be surprised if folks from Yahoo and Google are paying attention. Here are the three types:

1. Provider location
2. Content location
3. Serving area location

On top of that you have some issues with words and terms that sound like they could be geographical in nature, but aren't, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Denzel Washington. Because of those, it helps to have some additional address information to make the search engine actually understand that the geographic reference really is one that matters. It's not a bad idea to include references to well known landmarks like the St. Louis Arch, and other St. Louis landmarks if you want the search engine to understand that the content on your site focuses upon St. Louis. It might not be a good idea to make it think that the St. Louis Arc is the provider location for services or goods.


The impact of business objectives, targeted audience, and marketing plans

I think that you have to address all three of these to be really effective, but the effort towards each is going to depend upon your actual business objectives and marketing approach. It's hard to give an effective answer here that isn't book-lengthed because there isn't a simple answer. For me to provide good advice, I would really need to know a lot more about the organization, its locations, and its intended audience, how it interacts with the locations it is within, and how willing it might be to participate with those locations and the communities in those locations, and what its objectives are for people outside of those locations. Are its goals sales of goods or provisions of services online, sales or services at physical buildings at specific location or locations, lead generation, information sharing and/or education, brand development, etc. That kind of information is going to influence how "place" will play a role in what is presented upon pages.


Overlapping Search Algorithms

We are discussing using two different types of search here, with their own algorithms and approaches. One is organic web search, and the other is a local search directory (Google Maps, Yahoo Local) that relies upon extracting and aggregating information from a number of sources, including information it purchases from companies like telecommunication data sources, information it takes from web directories and review sites, and other information extracted from web sites.

A number of the methods I mentioned above could benefit one of those types of search, or both of them. Including information on your pages that could be effectively extracted for local search may also be helpful in longtail searches if the information isn't the main focus of the pages, but is, for instance, included in footers on pages. Pages where location is a focus (and are optimized for competitive geographically related keywords) can be things such as:

• Directions pages,
• "Our business and the local community" type pages,
• "Places to stay when visiting us" pages,
• "Places to dine when visiting us" pages,
• "Places to see when visiting us" pages,
• "Parks and Museums and schools in the area for the kids of potential homebuyers" pages,
• "Places to stay when students attend our school" type pages, etc.
• Others appropriate to the organization and its objectives, offerings, and approach to its customers

One of the July geographical patent applications from Google somewhat straddles local search and organic search. Location extraction Reading it, it appears to talk about those instances where local search results appear at the top of organic results. What queries trigger that? Is it possible to rank well for both the local results and the organic results for those queries if they get a decent amount of traffic?


Questions

How do you present geographic information on your pages so that the search engine can extract that information to understand that while your service may be located in one area, the focus of your content covers additional areas, and your intended audience comes from a wider scope?

Which keywords do you use that people from that wider scoped audience do you use that people outside of the area will search upon?

Another paper from Microsoft noted that they look at the types of query terms people use to find your site, and the IP addresses of people who visit your site to try to understand serving area location.

This tells me that it isn't a bad idea to try to rank very well for words that people from outside of the content location might use to find information within the content location.

So, how do you make it easy for the search engine to sort out this geographical information? How do you attract searchers from a national scope using both the local directory in a search engine, and an organic web search?

Geo targetting works best on local websites, because there are lots of pages with the same address linking to each other, while on a national site targetting a locality may be an issue.

You still need to do somethings to earn links from local places, whether it involves listings in local directories, or doing something that attracts those links from the local community.

Nice post, too.

Btw, what made you use Bill instead of bragadocchio?

Thanks!

It was available, and "bragadocchio" is hard for people to pronounce when I meet them in person.