Ensuring Your Local Search Engine Rankings

One of the great benefits of a web business is the ability to join the worldwide marketplace, however, there are a few reasons why some would like to ensure that they have local search engine rankings first. Such as, your web business may only be specific to your local area or you are offering a product that can only service local customers.

The great thing is it is a lot easier to first rank higher in the search engines locally than it is worldwide, as you could probably understand.

So what can you do to get the edge over the local competition and ensure your search engine rankings?

Ensuring Your Local Search Engine Rank

Here are a few tips that will help ensure that you achieve a higher local search engine rank:

Use Local Top Level Domain (TLD) – Using a country specific TLD for the domain would be the first step to ensuring your local rankings. For example, if you are wanted to rank in the United Kingdom you would use the TLD co.uk, or for Australia you would use .com.au.

The only thing to consider with this option is if you eventually would like to spread your web business worldwide then this option may not be suited to you, on the other hand you could always obtain the .com and other countries TLD as well.

Use Local Domain Registrar and Registrant – Make sure you use a local domain registrar and a local address when you are registering the domain (i.e. don’t use an Australian registrar and your Australian address if you want to rank well in the US). Probably not the biggest factor, however it is definitely worth considering.

Use Local Web Hosting Service – Hosting your website in your local area would most probably be one of the more important factors. Although it is commonly cheaper just to host your website on a standard shared server in the US, hosting in Australia if you want to rank well in Australia would definitely be worth the little extra expense.

Obtain Local Backlinks – It’s not easy, actually it is quite impossible to control who links to you on the web, although what you can do is focus some effort on trying to obtain links from other locally focused websites. This will definitely boost your rankings in the local searches.

Use Local Keywords – Try and use keywords on your website that a relevant to your local area. This would also apply to the anchor text in the backlinks you obtain (i.e. instead of have the anchor text ‘Acting School’ you could request the anchor text ‘Sydney Acting School’)

Local Contact Page Address – Although a pretty obvious one, some web businesses don’t put an address on their contact page. If you wish to rank locally, adding your local address to your websites contact page will help. This will also reassure your visitors that they are dealing with a local company.

Adopting one or preferably a combination of the above methods will definitely help to ensure that your local search engine rankings improve. If you know of any more techniques please feel free to share in the comments.