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If you run a business, it’s essential that potential customers in your area can easily find you with a relevant search of the internet. If you’re an accountant in Limerick, it would be helpful if your business page was easily found by people in the Limerick region.
Conversely, if you’re a search engine user in Limerick and you’re looking for an accountant, you’re probably not interested in accountants in Australia.
Fortunately, search engines know this – and in their quest to serve up useful results to users, they attempt to localise search results.
Unfortunately, many web-sites get this wrong. Behind the scenes, your website needs to be properly labelled – Google needs to know that your site is a business website (along with the type of business), and it needs to know that your address block is actually a physical address. Search engines are pretty smart, but they still need some pointers!
Correct Address Markup: Optimised for an Accountant
Correct labeling of addresses helps Google & other search engines to recognise that the website is a business page for an accountant, and that the address text refers to a physical location. This information is used to refine search results – if a user in Limerick is searching with the term “Accountant”, the search engine:
- Recognises that the page is that of an Accounting Service – and is hence relevant to the current search
- Recognises that the page refers to a service that is LOCAL to the person carrying out the search – and again, is relevant to the person searching
The page is hence more likely to be presented more prominently in search engine results.
The Ideal
Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at the correct code for a fictional Accountant in Limerick:
The Reality
Unfortunately, a lot of web designers/developers don’t bother with the proper code. This is more typical, and is based on a real website that we recently checked for a client:
In short – Google can’t tell that this text is an address – it therefore can’t properly localise your business. Though this stuff happens in the background of your site, it can have a major effect on your business website’s visibility in Google and other search engines.
Is your web presence correctly optimised for local search? Get in touch and we can help.