Webinar: Building a top-notch Local Search Site

Building a top-notch Local Search Site

Creating a local search site will help you unite your community around the best businesses and services offered in your town – with the added benefit of being able to generate recurring revenue.

Make sure you include as much content as you can, with both breadth and depth: e.g. as many listings, services, and classifieds as possible, and depth, which is how strong your listing’s content is, with comprehensive descriptions, very good photos, a video, features, hours, map, social media feeds, and so on.

If you happen to live in a big city, the quantity of content you can find might be overwhelming, so curation is the key to having a relevant local search site. Members (and new users) are drawn to content that is well-done and informative.

Define your target such as residents, tourists, and retirees so you can include relevant content for each one of these audiences. They will have different interests and will look for a variety of services and products on your website. Make sure to work keywords and SEO in your listings so your local search site can be ranked on search engines like Google.

In this week’s webinar, we went through the best practices and strategies to launch your own local search site with eDirectory including strategy and a hands-on demonstration. Enjoy this session.

Building a top-notch Local Search Site

Useful links and tools mentioned in the webinar:

*We are not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected to the tools and sites mentioned in the webinar.

This session was recorded on October 5th, 2022.

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Top 10 most valuable items to a local search site

Our Top 10 list of most valuable items to a local search site

  1. An ambitious site owner – If you don’t truly have a stake in the community your local search site is covering, chances are good all the rest are pretty hard to follow. It’s tough to update, write about or maintain a site that has subject matter you’re really not interested in. Think about it.
  2. A well balanced focused – Not too geographically large (a local search site for the entire state of California) but not too geographically small (a local search site for a town of 400 people).
  3. Events – Keep up to date with what’s going on in the community. Whether these are paid event listings or free, a local search site should keep their events up to date and accurate.
  4. A good hook – What makes you better than the next online site that covers your area, or for that matter, Yelp, a local newspaper or other going out guide?
  5. An editorial voice – Your site should provide some type of editorial content where necessary. Whether that’s an academic article, a blog post or human interest story, it’s important to have a focus and voice.
  6. Fresh Content – Google loves fresh content. Search engines in general like to see that you’re updating the website and producing content of some kind on a consistent basis.
  7. Blog – Similar to #5, a blog is likely what’s going to keep your finger on the pluse of a community. Whether you’re reviewing a restaurant, interviewing a business owner or aggregating local news, it’s important to keep the content flowing.
  8. Unique Content – Aggregating news and posting events isn’t enough. You should be doing your own feature stories, interviews or reviews and coming up with editorial and information content that is going to keep people coming back.
  9. Otherwise un-aggregated content – List out specials, sales, happy hours, nightlife, drink specials, lunch specials or dinner specials, things that visitors would otherwise have to go to each business’s website to find.
  10. Data/Listings – A large reason why people came to your site in the first place is to find information about a local business. Whether that’s a telephone number, hours, reviews or menu, it’s vital to keep all of your listings up to date.