Whether you are a business with brick and mortar stores or a company without borders, you should be tapping into the growing number of local audiences seeking products and services in their own locality. You can increase business exposure and your web and store traffic simply by including geographical information to your digital content. Geotagging and local search optimization are two technology-based solutions that savvy marketers are using to attract the crucial local market segment.
4 Tips To Extend Market Reach Through Local Search Optimization & Geotagging
- Geotagging: Allows businesses to embed geographical location information within websites, images, videos and other digital media. Coordinates on the page boost your visibility and enhance usefulness as people are able to copy them directly into their GPS devices and get them on mobile phones via Apps. Below are a few platforms that support geolocation tagging (geotagging) that you may want to consider utilizing:
- Twitter geolocation for tweets coupled with local trends from Twitter can give you insights and exposure to your local audience.
- BrightKite Gowalla and Loopt allow users to check in at locations, and the ability to share that activity among a network of friends.
- Foursquare allows for check-ins.
- Google has added geotagging to Blogger.
- Google Buzz nearby mobile feature serves up a list about places, and users can read Buzz info about those places from others who are both in and outside their networks.
- Flickr and Panoramio geotag and display these images in a mapping context.
- Yelp now enables the ability to check-in to venues. Considering there are some 1.25 million users of the Yelp iPhone app, this is huge for businesses.
- Semantic markup in the form of hCard microformats  (optimized format for web publishing) as a component of local search optimization allows contact information such as addresses and phone numbers to be disclosed precisely to devices that are able to read them.
- Meta Data on websites with geotargeted keywords to attract search engine traffic based on local search queries
- Submitting to local business directories with Geo-optimized content:
- Top Local Search Engines, such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, and MSN’s Live Local.
- Top online Yellow Pages, such as Superpages.com, YellowPages.com, and Switchboard.com.
Your local audience is looking for relevant local information using various devices (GPS, computers, mobile phones); you need to optimize your web properties for local searchers and leverage from people looking for deals and events in their neighborhoods .   Not only should your web site rank well in searches for your local area or for different locations that you serve, but your social media should also include geotags to show your  business as part of a community.
Your customers are out and about searching for your products and services…the question is,  are you ready to be found?
Tag. Your turn to act.
