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The Importance of Local Search:

While most in the tech industry have been watching the battle go on between Google and Facebook, Google launching Plus and Facebook Photo Credit planetc1talking about beginning a search engine of their own, under the radar comes Siri with possibly a huge advantage with local search.  Can Siri and Yelp change the scope of local search SEO?  Yes, if you’re a small locally owned business it’s worth taking the time and effort to work on getting some yelp reviews. Working with small locally owned businesses I’ve blogged before about the importance of reviews and local SEO search, but this is a game changer for local media search.  This isn’t going to happen overnight, but for the local business owner who will benefit from local searches you had might as well start now, this is why. In the first quarter of 2012 over 1.5 million iPhones were sold.  This generation of the iPhone comes with your own personal assistant Siri.  The amount of iPhone sales is only going to grow and everyday more and more people are going to have Siri as a personal assistant.  So just how does Siri work with a local search?

How Siri Will Change Local Search

Siri/Apple have partnered with yelp to generate her response to local search requests.  If you were to ask Siri for Mexican Restaurants in Portland Oregon, Siri is going to draw from Yelp reviews with her answer.  So if you want Siri to recommend your business when an iPhone user asks her for relevant suggestions, you’re going to need to focus your priorities on directories and especially reviews on yelp. This is because Siri is going to make recommendations based on a user’s location, and Apple believes that Yelp gives them the most qualified information that is not owned by Google or Facebook. For a local business and local search what does this mean?  Simply put, businesses will have to strengthen their local presence in Yelp. They will also have to make their websites more mobile-friendly. Additionally, businesses will have to incorporate keywords into their websites that reflect spoken as well as written queries. As always if you have any questions about how to plan and strategize for this change in local search please contact us we’d be happy to answer any questions about this.  

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