beren - 10:25 pm on Nov 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

Local search is gaining ground all the time, which is great for businesses with a local or regional focus. But what about for businesses seeking a nationwide or international market? (My clients sell in the US, so forgive my provincial US centeredness.)

Part of what our webpages do is try to sell the proposition that we don’t need to be near you. We’re better than your local provider, and you shouldn’t care about where we are located. And most of our competitors on natural search are also selling nationwide and we all focus on general phrases without geographic qualifiers for the most part. Which is fine because not many potential customers think to search with geographic search terms.

Now if a search engine explicitly asks them to put in a location or automatically assumes their locations based on their IP addresses, then local businesses may be preferred. So that pushes us national businesses out.

How do the search engines know where a business is located? By reading the About Us page on the website, I suppose, and getting the address.

So here’s what I’m thinking: create pages with local street addresses around the country. Maybe one in each of the 15 largest metropolitan areas. The search engine will assume that this is your business location and feed your site to users in the area.

Could this work? Someone please shoot down this idea.