A common problem that small businesses often face is that they don’t have the budget required to pursue an SEO campaign that targets generic terms such as restaurants or florists due to the high traffic volumes associated with these keywords and hence the high competition that naturally follows.

In order to get the most out of a small budget it is often the case that long tail keyphrases are targeted. Whilst these phrases have significantly less search engine traffic, the right phrases can be profitable due to high relevancy, which as a result, increases the chance of converting a prospect into a customer. Long tail keyphrases should always be targeted wherever possible due to this increased relevancy from the initial search to your product or service, however, due to a recent Google development it may be possible for small businesses to benefit from generic search phrases without having to set aside a huge budget for SEO.

On Monday Google announced changes that will make it easier for users to perform local searches. This development could have a positive impact upon many small businesses that rely on local business such as restaurants and florists.

Google will increase the relevancy of local businesses in the search results for search terms that do not include a location via the use of IP addresses. Via the IP address of the web user Google will be able to determine the general location of the searcher and will be able to display results relevant to that location.

This by no means makes SEO obsolete because businesses will always be required to do everything in their power to show the search engines the relevancy of their website for a search phrase whether it is generic or a long-tail keyphrase. However, it is good news for businesses that target customers locally as they will no doubt welcome more search engine exposure without having to increase their SEO budgets. This latest development is also good news for web users because anything to increase the relevancy of search engine results can only be seen as a good thing and it is yet another step towards sifting out irrelevant search engine results and spam.

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Google, Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation