We all want to draw business from either the entire country or around the world. The key is you need to cultivate and grow in your local "neighborhood" first. The way you do that on the Internet is to cultivate and grow your Local SEO. When it comes to search engine optimization you have local SEO that is focused on locally rather the broader terms through regular SEO.
Like regular SEO local SEO requires the mentality that this will not happen overnight or even in a few weeks. You do have to work, train, and educate the search engines about who you are, what you stand for, why they want to index you locally for the phrases you want, and most importantly where you are located. Local search is all about location to where you are compared to the person doing the search.
When you search for "Italian restaurants" from home and then from the other side of town you will notice that the results will typically change. The reason is your phone/mobile device (even your home laptop or desktop computer) provides the latitude and longitude that your internet/phone provider believes you are at. With local search paid advertisers will still show at the top but the rest are all distance based. Based on what the search engine believes are the closest locations will show to you.
If local search is more about distance and finding people near you why would content be important? The reason is that any site can claim to be "local" but being local without relevant content is not useful to the user and a site will not rank well.
When it comes to local search there are two types of intent.
The first is considered an explicit local intent. This means that the city name is included in the state name. Example: Italian restaurant Valparaiso
The second is considered an implicit local intent. This means that a search happens without a city name and the search engines utilize the user's location to determine the best results. Example: Italian restaurant
Other factors that can affect local search are local search repositories like the online yellow pages, Google/Bing/Yahoo! listings, Angie's list, or even Facebook.
When searching other ways that can help are mentions from other local businesses that are close to your business. These local mentions can assist in proving relevance for your business in the local area.
Local search works in many ways the same as traditional search engine optimization. When you look down the search engine path the local part of the local search engine optimization needs to take into account content that is relevant to your local location and factors based on latitudes and longitudes.
For help in standard and local search you can count on the dedicated team at JM2 Webdesigners in Valparaiso Indiana to help your business grow using all white hat techniques. You can reach us at @BUSINESSPHONETOLLFREE@, email at @BUSINESSEMAILADDRESS@, or through our online contact form here.