You’ve heard it before for real estate –location, location, location. But for service businesses too, location can be essential, even on the Internet. In the United States, millions of people search for local products and services on the Internet every month. If you want your website to bring in more local customers, tailor your Web pages for local searchers, even if you also sell worldwide.

 

How to Grab Local Searchers

To tailor your pages for this, include local or regional information, as zip code, city, state, county, or street, on each of your Web pages as text. You can simply add this information to the header or footer of all of your Web pages. For a site seeking to attract local business, this makes more sense than burying the information on your Contact Us page only.

 

You might want to put local or regional qualifiers into your Page Title, also. The Page Title is the text that displays at the top of your web browser window. You can edit your page title with content management software such as Adobe Contribute.

 

Localizing the Global Medium

The Internet is unquestionably the global medium par excellence. Even so, if you’re competing on the Web for local customers who are using search engines, you often face much less competition than you would when locality doesn’t matter. Therefore, local businesses could get the jump on big national businesses in this arena. So play with the localized content on your Web pages. Let me know what you try and how it works for you.