mara, there are so many connections between your new post and your original questions about "keywords ranking in New York based IP address" that it made sense simply to splice the new post onto this thread.
You haven't, btw, gotten back to this thread and answered the follow-up questions that martinibuster and I raised about whether you're asking about the rankings of any site in general in the New York serps, or whether you're asking about a site in NYC that you'd like to rank better for New York queries, so I'm filling in my assumptions. I think that your posted example suggests the latter... that you're wanting to target a site in New York to rank for specific local searches.
Keywords + <Pincode> Example: Professional Services 10010
We don't use the word Pincode in the US, or at least I'd never heard it applied to geo-search. In the US, which is where New York is, it's called a
"ZIP Code" or
"zipcode". The term
"postcode" is used in the UK.
The 10010 zipcode you mention is in New York City (and I happen to recognize it because I lived in that part of the city for a while, but I never once used the zip code to describe it.).
In terms of search, I myself feel that it's bad practice to target organic searches only by ZIP code. Most users tend to use the metro name or sometimes the neighborhood name (say if you were searching from within a metro area). For 10010, I suspect that most looking for something within that area would have described it simply as Gramercy Park. A lot, though, depends on what the search is for.
A search for an attorney, eg, might be city wide, though someone living in Brooklyn might, say, want to distinguish between a Manhattan attorney and a Brooklyn attorney, depending upon the type and level of legal services they're looking for.
Food or shopping searches, on the other hand, are often much more local... and if the searcher is on mobile, the context may suggest that they're searching for something nearby.
To answer your key question... in general, not many local searches for the purposes of discovery are done by zip code, and for that and other reasons I wouldn't specifically target the ZIP code.
Reasons... there are often multiple zip codes within a city or even within neighborhoods in a large city, and the zipcode areas don't necessarily correspond the user-identified landmarks, streets, or neighborhoods. So, even though Google can now figure out by a zip code roughly where you're talking about, a zip code target by itself on the site might be too narrow... and most people really don't remember most places by zip-code number. Searchers might, though, take an address line from a website or a Google local business listing that includes a city plus zip, and paste the entire address into a map search.
On the site itself, I'd say that you should definitely use both the cityname and the zipcode, but I'd almost never use the zipcode in the page title.
For some types of businesses, you might also want to target the neighborhood. Yelp and Google can both provide most commonly searched neighborhood names. When you search, Yelp, say for [yelp restaurants new york] you'll get Google autocomplete suggestions almost immediately localizing results to Manhattan, to Midtown Manhattan, Upper East (or West) Side, etc. Hotels target neighborhoods in a city for reasons relating either to tourist, shopping, or convention locations, and come close to having their own naming conventions.
Note that we also have a forum dedicated to local search and the local map algorithm, which to some degree differs from plain vanilla organic... You'd find that here... "Local Search" [
webmasterworld.com...]
