Thomas Olesen Discusses What is Local Search in the Second Installment of His Blog Post Series

MyLocal, based in Norfolk, UK, has announced that owner Thomas Olesen has released the second instalment of his planned blog post series designed to update his book, Local Search Optimisation. It is his plan to provide updates to his book, one chapter at a time, through a series of blog posts. This second blog post in the series focuses on defining what Local Search means. More about this can be found by reading the blog post on the MyLocal website.

Thomas Olesen explains, “Search engines recognise local search queries by a number of factors including geo-modifiers such as the names of cities or phrases like Near Me. These queries then pull their results from structured databases such as Yellow Pages. That is why businesses can be found online without having a website.” These databases compete in the organic search results and usually crowd out individual local business websites. Therefore, a good strategy is to be listed in as many of these databases as possible as that increases your chances of being found online. “If you can’t beat them join them”.

If you have a website, it can be linked to your listing in these databases and found via local SEO. MyLocal collaborates with the client’s website designer to enhance the ability of the site to be found in these local search queries. They specialise in local SEO and most of their work is done off-site, meaning that they don't modify the website itself. But the site’s webmaster may still have some things to do on-site and MyLocal works with them to ensure that onsite and off-site work complement each other.

Thomas Olesen had previously published the book titled, Local Search Optimisation which is currently still available on Amazon. This book was published in 2017 and therefore, it is somewhat outdated in view of the fast developments in SEO. Rather than update the book, Thomas Olesen planned to provide updates through a series of blog posts. This was previously announced in a press release issued by MyLocal.

MyLocal provides advice to businesses who want to establish or improve their online presence, specifically providing local SEO, online visibility and online credibility services. Online visibility has to do with making the business site widely available online. It should be pointed out that if the only online presence of a business is in the form of a website, the chances are that the search will not consider the business to be important and the site will find it hard to rank high in the SERPs.

The situation would be different if the site is listed correctly in various places, such as directories, maps, industry niche sites, review sites, social media sites, local sites, video sites. This would get the attention of Google and other search engines, helping the site rank higher in the search results.

Meanwhile, online credibility is what people think when they find one's business online, wherever that happens to be. It is quite likely to be a third-party listing like Yelp and so it is important to claim all such listings so that they can be optimised and made to look impressive. Also, third party reviews can help boost online credibility. Some businesses are concerned about poor online reviews, which is why some companies are offering reputation management systems of the type used by MyLocal.

And, of course, MyLocal also offers local SEO services, the subject of this blog series and book. The idea is to help local businesses to be found online even if they don’t have a website. If they do, it is far more cost effective to rank in local search results than to rank a website in organic search results.

People who are interested in local SEO services may want to check out the MyLocal website, or contact them on the telephone, or through email. They may also want to check out their Google My Business post. They are open from Monday to Friday, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.