Highlight your local business with rich snippets

Local SEO is really an area of search engine optimization that has been around for a very long time. It’s only in the last few years that people are putting more and more importance and devotion into strengthening their website’s local SEO capabilities. It seems that local SEO is almost being promoted as a new kind of SEO services by many internet marketing companies but we’ve been running what we consider to be local campaigns since we started the A to Z Net Ventures company. Local SEO is simply getting a site found in the search engines by potential clients either already in the company’s geographical area of business or potential clients looking for a business within a specific geographical area.

Local SEO is Not New but Methods Have Evolved

A few years ago, local SEO focused on getting a website found for a series of keyword phrases with the geographical area added into the mix, for example, ‘houston dog grooming’. Search engines were more focused on the content of your site and keyworded links pointing to your site from other external sites. Although the search engines are still very interested in your site content and incoming links, they have become more advanced in the way they decide to deliver the user with results. If you run a Google search for ‘dog grooming’ today in New York, you will see different results from the results you get back in Houston. A search made from a computer in Houston will deliver more websites from businesses Google considers to be located in Houston because Google uses a number of geographical SEO indicators that help produce a set of results more relevant to the searcher. So the search engines are smarter but this means local search engine ranking methods require more work to be competitive. There are a number of these geographical SEO indicators, both on page and off page but in this post I’m just going to talk about one of the more recent indicators; rich snippets, specifically microdata. Rich snippets are simple codes you can add to elements of your web page to highlight them to the search engines as specific kinds of information, from product reviews to you business NAP (Name, Address and Phone number). It is the NAP we are interested in for local search engine optimization purposes.

SEO TIP: Learn about the importance of getting your NAP right and keeping it consistent in all your internet marketing efforts in order to get higher local rankings. Read our blog post ‘How Powerful Are Local Search Citations in Your Local SEO Campaign?‘

Microdata is a form of Rich Snippet Google Recommends

You can use specific microdata in your website to tell Google (and Bing and Yahoo!) exactly where you are located and it is very easy to set up your self if you can handle some simple updates to your own website’s HTML code. The following code shows how your basic NAP can be formatted using microdata:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness">
<div itemprop="name"><strong>Your Business Name</strong></div>
<div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">Your Business Address</span><br>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Your City</span><br>
<span itemprop="addressRegion">Your State</span><br>
<span itemprop="postalCode">Your Zip Code</span><br>
<span itemprop="telephone">(123) 456-7890</span><br>
</div>
</div>

Of course you can easily use CSS and other HTML to make the above appear more attractive in your web pages. Copy and paste the above replacing with your specific business details if you like but I recommend using the Schema Creator website so you know how and you can also play with the various options they provide specific to your needs. You might notice that the phone number property is not included with the ‘Local Business’ option on the ‘Organization’ Schema Creator page. I don’t know why but I strongly suggest you add it to your code – copy from the above if you like.

Once you’ve got your own code ready, simply paste it into your web pages – we strongly suggest using it on every page, probably either in your footer or a sidebar. When your rich snippets are live on your site, you should validate using Google’s rich snippets testing tool. This is a very quick way to double check your rich snippets code will be recognized by Google. Once you’ve okayed it with Google you’re done!

Using microdata should be another tool to include in your local SEO efforts. It’s not difficult to set up but just remember that you want NAP consistency across all online references for your business whenever possible.

The post What are Rich Snippets / Microdata & How Are They Used for Local SEO on Your Website? appeared first on AtoZ Houston SEO.