One thing you can always beat your competition on is your location. It is unique to you.
When you need to be the top of search results, and competitive, or generic phrases describe what you do, then you can use a local modifier to bring you to the top. Why? Becuase Google will do so too.
Google’s local maps that come up within Google search results when you do business specific searches. However, the rest of the search results will also have some local bias. You must not expect Google to know where you are. The algorithm is pretty clever, but it is best to make sure you make it very clear. To do this there are certain ways to show ‘metadata’ information on your web pages.
In this post, we will deal just with location metadata. Consider your address. Google is likely to recognise this as an address, but how does it know what it relates to. You could have a million different reasons for displaying an address in a web page, but you need to mark when it is relevant to the search.
The official protocol for this is Schema.org markup which actually goes much further than address and can include product information and lots of other information. So, we wrap the text of our address in certain tags and then the search engine knows how to process this. You do not have to enforce all pages into one location. If you have an event at a different location then use the same protocol on that page to flag up the different location.
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness"> <p itemprop="name">COMPANY NAME</p> <p itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"> <p itemprop="streetAddress">ADDRESS LINE 1</p> <p itemprop="addressLocality">CITY</p>, <p itemprop="addressRegion">REGION</p> <p itemprop="postalCode">POSTCODE/ZIP</p> <p itemprop="telephone">PHONE NUMBER</p> <meta itemprop="latitude" content="LATITUDE" /> <meta itemprop="longitude" content="LONGITUDE" /> </div>
The quickest way to add this information is to use the ‘Text’ display mode rather than the ‘visual’ display mode. You can copy and paste the text above and just edit the information of the address, which is shown in capitals. When you return to the visual mode it should look like this. (all the meta tags are hidden.)
COMPANY NAME
ADDRESS LINE 1
CITY
REGION
POSTCODE/ZIP
PHONE NUMBER
If you find yourself with layout issues, ie these P tags are creating new lines and paragraph ends, you will be pleased to know that you can also use the itemprop element on other tags.
