In our last post, “Online Search Results – A Matter of First Impression”, we learned that many factors come in to play when searching for products or services on the internet. Today I would like to focus on businesses in the city of Waukesha, WI.
As a local Waukesha search strategist, I am constantly searching Waukesha business listings for the various products offered by businesses in the Waukesha area. I analyze business listings and refine data to compare business profiles with other, alike businesses to discern how search engines like Google and Bing give more precedence to one business over the other. Knowing this delicate information helps me help businesses throughout the county.
In most cases it is evident that some Waukesha business owners have never claimed their Google or Bing business page to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the search giants. Moreover, claiming your business allows you, the owner, to secure the integrity of your business details, and to prevent others from modifying specific facts about your business. Claiming your business, providing all of the relevant categories of your business, and verifying the authenticity of your business is key to having your business rank well in search results. As such, knowing this information also helps to properly search the web for the best results and which results are authentic.
Let’s say you were going downtown for Friday Night Live and you wanted to enjoy dinner with the family before the events starts. How would you search for a place to eat in downtown Waukesha? Would you search for “restaurants in Waukesha”, or would you search for “restaurants in downtown Waukesha”? I would use the latter term, and I’ll explain why you, too, should defer to using long keyword-tail queries when you want to find legitimate products and businesses on the web.
Long Keyword-Tail Search vs. Singular/Short Keyword Search
I don’t think that it’s unreasonable for me to expect to see the websites for local restaurants when I perform a search for restaurants in downtown Waukesha. However, depending on how you search – the number of key words used in the search – plays a major role in what is returned in the search results for Waukesha restaurants.
For example, if I search for “restaurants in Waukesha” not a single restaurant website is displayed. Rather, I see results for Urban Spoon, Trip Advisor, and Yelp, just to name a few. The truth is that I want the business website, not a third party site that will eventually lead me to a specific restaurant website. Although most of these websites are legitimate platforms that provide valuable information and reviews about restaurants, maybe I just want to view what the special of the day is – something third party sites rarely provide. So how do I get results that show restaurants’’ websites?
The tried and true way of getting more specific search results is by utilizing long-tail keyword phrases that are more specific than a few singular words. For example, when I search for “restaurants in downtown Waukesha,” Google provides a more specified list of results that focus geographically on downtown Waukesha rather than restaurants generally. To better understand how and why this works, I will have to get into a recent algorithm scheme called “Hummingbird” that Google has been implementing for several months. That will be the focus of our next article which will soon follow.
Until then, here’s to your successful search!