How to balance International and Local Search targeting?

[emerald]

Hi guys,

A local company provides tourism services in Spain but its potential clients reside abroad in USA mostly.

This means we have 2 search potentials:
1. For reaching international clients via international search in advance before they arrive (preferred).
2. Last minute booking potential for local serach when they have already arrived and seek a service while already here.

So far we have targeted USA and international searches solely and ignored local search. We have tried to target our website to USA in GoogleWebmasterTools and link building location mostly.

But what about local search? Would establishing ourselves in Local Search (google places and maps etc) be a confusion for Google and mess with our good rankings in US? Or would it add to our potential of additional last minute local seaches?

What's the best approach in a situation like this? Is a happy medium possible?

Thanks in advance.

[AppleCapitalGroup]

In order to build the local search. Create a page for each city. I would do 5 at a time and personalize it. Go where you get the most clients first. So Spain. Travel to Spain. Have a page for NY, LA, Chicago, Houston And Philly first., Customize it for the city and build from there.

[AppleCapitalGroup]

I would go as far as to invest in a local phone and address with a virtual office for a few months to build with the page.

[MiriamEllis]

Greetings, Emerald!
Thank your for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. While a local campaign in highly unlikely to injure your international results, you must be able to answer yes to having ALL of these items in place in order to qualify as a local business:

1. A legal business name.
2. A real physical location in a city in the US (not a virtual office, P.O. box, shared space or any other substitute)
3. A local area code phone number in the city of location (not a redirected phone number or toll free number)
4. You must either be the sort of business to which clients come to do face-to-face business in your office in this city, or, you must have staff that goes out from the office to the clients' homes or businesses. If business is conducted virtually, it does not qualify as local in the eyes of the search engines.

If your client can answer yes to all 4 of those things, then they can certainly engage in some Local SEM. You would want to have a good landing page on the cite for the city in question, and also include the complete NAP in the website footer site-wide. You would want copy that speaks to the geography of this physical location. Additionally, you would want to get your client correctly profiled at Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local and other relevant directories.

Sincerely hope this answer helps. Good luck!
Miriam

[emerald]

Thanks for your responses. I had meant whether we should go after Local Search Spain rather than US for last minute bookers?

Do you all mean therefore that it's only applicabe for going for local search in USA as our clients reside in USA (this could be true for advance bookings like situation 1, but what about my last minute situation 2 above)?

So I shouldn't bother with Local Search ideas for Spain (last minute US clients already in Spain searching for last minute tour etc).

I guess this is more complicated because of the international situation - would love advice for our particular international situation, unless I misunderstood.

Miriam to answer your question:
1. We have a legal business name in Spain.
2. Our real physical location in not in US. We do not have US PO box. We reside and operate from a city in Spain.
3. Our local area code phone number will be in our city in Spain, not US.
4. Last minute bookers can call into our office in Spain.

But again our incoming clients are Americans from USA, hence the question on how to approach this.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Again Emerald,

I hope we are all understanding your question better after the further details you have provided. As you answered all of my 4 questions - positively - for your city in Spain, then there is no reason why you cannot engage in a Local Search campaign. When I search, from my computer in the USA, for 'travel agency madrid, spain' Google shows me local results for that city. So, yes, it is certainly possible for you to do this.

You will want to make sure that your website has basic local optimization in place and then get the business listed in Google Places and other relevant local business indexes.

On a final note, I need to mention that I would not recommend setting up any virtual offices either in the USA or Spain as this would violate Google's Places Quality Guidelines. See: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

Hope this helps!

Miriam