A local business needs to have its contact information present on every page of the site. That means name, address, phone number. This makes it easy for your customers to contact you without digging through unfamiliar navigation. It also helps the search engines understand that you are a local business and give you a boost accordingly.
The best place to put this information is together in the footer of your site. If you have a look at the bottom of this page you’ll see it on the right. Name, address phone number.
Ok, you may already have that in place, but is is just regular text or a Rich Snippet?
Rich Snippets are used by Google & Bing to better understand your website and enhance your search engine listing. Rich Snippets are often the reason you see some search engine results look a little differently, whether that’s a bulleted list, star reviews or a product image.
Rich Snippets are a small piece of code added to html tags that aren’t visible to the visitor. If you view the source of the page, you can see them if you’re really interested. It doesn’t change how human browsers see the information, but it greatly improves the “user experience” for the search engine spider (the little robots that crawl around indexing the internet).
If you run your website on wordpress and your theme allows for footer widgets, just insert a text widget, copy & past the following and change the highlighted text to your details.
<div class=”vcard”>
<a class=”url fn n” href=”http://www.yourdomain.com“><div class=”org”>Business Name</div></a>
<div class=”adr”>
<div class=”street-address”>Street Address</div>
<span class=”locality”>Suburb</span> <span class=”region”>STATE</span> <span class=”postal-code”>Postcode</span>, <span class=”country-name”>Country</span>
</div>
<div class=”tel”>Phone Number</div>
</div>
It’s fairly self-explanatory, but basically, you’re using the popular vCard format to beef up the information.
Why bother doing this? Isn’t it obvious from the layout that it’s a business name, address and phone number? It is for us, but remember that search engine spiders are just machines. Machines with far too much work to do in too little time. Helping them to do their job by pointing out important parts of your website helps you. Without the Rich Snippets, they’ll just see your address as a collection of words and numbers.
Rich Snippets with your business information don’t currently enhance your search engine listing, but they often go a long way to helping you rank higher in the Google/Bing Maps when someone searches for your industry.
As I said before, having your contact information on each page will give you a boost in the search engines for local business search terms. That’s because you’re making sure that local words appear on every page. The search engines have a list of factors for ranking pages for local search terms. The more boxes you tick from those factors, the more likely you site will rank higher for the local search terms.
For more info on implementing Rich Snippets, see:
Leave a Reply