Local Search Different from Local Searching

[St0n3y]

Does anybody have any insignt on Google Local? I find that when I type in my key phrase in Google with my city and state, my site comes up at the top, as it should. However if I go to Google Local and perform the same search my site is nowwhere to be found. Even worse is that sites that have nothing to do with the industry come up on top of the local search.

I'm curious if anybody know why the discrepency.

[Marcia]

Local Search is far from perfected, unfortunately. Regular search used for searching for something on a local level is algorithmically based, so if site owners have been wise enough to make sure their sites are recognized for what they're relevant for, they should come up doing local searching in the regular organic search.

I can only assume that Local Search is based on a pre-fixed taxonomy, so the results will necessarily limited be because of inaccuracies or omissions in the data.

Local Search for

sewing machine repair san fernando valley (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=sewing+machine+repair+san+fernando+valley)

Unable to understand address san fernando valley. Please try another address.
Wrong! That's just incapacity because of lack of relevant data in whatever taxonomy they're using in the Local Search.

In this case: the San Fernando Valley is a large section at the northwest portion of the City of Los Angeles - and there are many, many localities that have "city" type post office addresses as a convenience that are nothing more than a relatively tiny area encompassed by a zip (or postal) code. Los Angeles is HUGE - and people who live in the Valley do their searches for the Valley - not by each little subsection, which would be lousy way to search. They may look for an apartment that way, but not other things - like takeout pizza, or a plumber or air conditioning repair.

It would be the same thing in the San Francisco vicinity, with people searching for Bay Area businesses - or Silicon Valley, looking for businesses. People search for many, many things by convenient area designations, not specific "cities" - or zip codes.

That obviously can't be recognized by search engines yet - in fact the problem was only just addressed by ODP not too long ago, with additional categories being added for some of the areas surrounding the Greater Los Angeles area. I'd assume the search engines, especially Google who use the ODP data, could take a cue from and take advantage by making use of the accuracy of the human intervention that improved ODP's structure.

Sorry - sometimes, normal human beings just do some things better than search engine software engineers. :p

[St0n3y]

We've been doing some testing to see what it takes to get our site to come up on the local search for our keywords. We even made sure our city and state was on every page. Its been a while but still no results on local search but, we still come up in general search using keyword and city, state!

[NFFC]

Are you listed in the Yellow Pages?

[St0n3y]

ahhhhh.... that may be the key... no, we are not in the Yellow pages.