Where is the Address?
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011Let’s face it … everyone wants their website to appear on the first page of Google’s search results for important terms. But for many small businesses and their websites there is an important feature that is often overlooked because, even though it is a string of text, it’s not one that web designers always think of.
When we design a website for a business we often think that the most important terms are those that are associated with what the business does so if the website is for an electrician we think about all the elctrical terms that people might enter into Google in attempt to find a website associated with an electrician.
If it’s a website for a plumber we think of plumbing terms and if we’re building a website for a mechanic we think of terms associated with car repairs and car servicing. And that’s all fine but we forget that the people who are searching for those terms usually want a local business so they want to see results businesses near them.
In fact Google understands that need and even if the person searching doesn’t specify a location Google will show them websites that usually belong to businesses that are close to the person doing the search. But how does Google know that a website might be relevant to someone searching in Hervey Bay for example.
Well when Google crawls a web page it looks for a street address … a suburb … a postcode … and a telephone number and from that information Google can tell if a website really is relevant … in terms of locality … to the person doing the search.
So what do we often overlook when we’re building a website for a small business that draws its client base from a local area? We forget the address and the postcode and the phone number. Sure, we might include it on a generic contact page but that’s simply not enough.
If you want your website to have a good chance of ranking well in the search results that are relevant to a specific area then you MUST include the address, postcode and phone number of the business in text (not as an image) on every single page of the website … and it’s best if you show those details somewhere prominent.
Hiding it down at the foot of the page isn’t good enough.
