Is it still best practice to optimize your site with geographic long tail keywords?

[RickyShockley]

Since Google is tailoring search results to user IP and location, is it still best practice to optimize your site titles etc. with long-tail geographic keywords? For example, instead of optimizing a page for "dentist in West Palm Beach, Florida", search users who are IN West Palm Beach can just search "dentists" and a list of local dentists will be displayed (both in the local listings AND organic search listings).  I'd love to see Rand cover this on a Whiteboard Friday!

[WesleySmits]

Optimizing the page with geographic long tail keywords is still best practice.
Google does display local search results based on IP adress when they have access to the location data of the given person.

I would still recommend using the location based keywords as long as you don't keyword stuff your texts.

Hope i answered your question

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Ricky,

Absolutely, when working with local businesses like dentists, you should be specifying their location in many areas of their website. These might include title and meta description tags, alt tags, link anchor text, on-page content, and schema-encoded NAP (name, address, phone number) on the footer and contact page of the website. Of course, do this in a non-spammy manner - as Wesley mentions - stuffing is neither necessary nor desirable. Your brick-and-mortar clients will typically be hoping for inclusion in Google's local results for the city in which they are physically located. Google will show these results both to searches who are in that city or who are including that city in their search term. For SABs (service area businesses like plumbers and carpet cleaning companies), again, the client should aim for local inclusion for the city where they are physically located, but organic inclusion for their service cities where they aren't physically located. This is how it typically works.