Over the past 8 years of using the Internet to obtain business and enhance relationships I have always advised and mentioned one fact with some consistency, and this fact or point was “not to exclude location” when considering your Search Engine and Website optimisation.
There were several reasons for this and now we have some updates from Google that location is indeed going to be an major consideration for them in the future. If you combine this with the facts that Twitter and Facebook already have/will be having soon location dependent features you should start to see how important this is.
Search Engines and Location should be an integral part of your consideration when setting up or amending your Blogs and Websites, importantly anything you do in relation to Facebook and Twitter will also need to reflect this.
Let me give you some examples, if we take the term Independent Financial Adviser and use this on search engine like Google returns are about 1 million hits or matched terms, now if you are managing an Independent Financial Adviser website the level of competition for your keywords are great.
In order to appear anywhere near the top of the ranking you will have your work cut out, however if you narrowed this down to Independent Financial Adviser Croydon you will find the level of competition reduced to around 100,000, getting a bit easier.
However this is not the only reason for using your location.
What are your potential customers looking for, normally it would be an adviser in Croydon or Palmers Green, or wherever. So your focus should be around this specific term and not general or generic search terms.
It is also possible to find out in advance by using specific Webmaster tools and by doing some research in advance that is before you start your optimisation. With Iphone applications like Foursquare becoming very normal you should be taking action now before your site is consigned to one that could have been