Depending on the type of business you are operating ranking well in local search may be very important. When people are looking for local services such as electricians, plumbers, lawyers, restaurants, etc they will attach a geo-location to their search query. For example, if you are an electrician deserving the Montreal area you will want people who are searching for “electrician in montreal” to land on your website and not your competitor’s website. To make sure this does not happen you have to put some effort into local search marketing.

One more incentive to perform in local search is that Google puts forward its business listings from Google Maps when it detects a local search. It is thus much easier to rank at the top for competitive keywords if you know what you do.

Google Local Search: Electrician in Montreal

The question now is how does Google know my business location? Well, you can either submit your business to Google Maps or let him find it on your website. The latter is not a simple task for a robot and the indexed address often contain errors. There is where comes the hCard comes to the rescue. The hCard is a XHTML microformat to publish contact details for individuals, companies and organizations. In May 2009, Google announced that it would start using it to populate its search results.

Creating an hCard for your business is very simple and totally invisible to the user. On your website’s contact page or anywhere you wish to display your business location you do so using a special set of classes on your div’s, span’s and a’s. An example would help a lot to understand.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA
Phone: +1 650-253-0000
Email: info@google.com
Fax: +1 650-253-0001

These contact details in hCard format:

html code
<div class="vcard">
   <div class="fn org">Google Inc.</div>
   <div class="adr">
      <div class="street-address">1600 Amphitheatre Parkway</div>
      <span class="locality">Mountain View</span>, 
      <span class="region">CA</span> <span class="postal-code">94043</span>
      <div class="country-name">USA</div>
   </div>
   <div>Phone: <span class="tel">+1 650-253-0000</span></div>
   <div>Email: <span class="email">info@google.com</span></div>
   <div>Fax: <span class="fax">+1 650-253-0001</span></div>
</div>

It is good to mention that the hCard microformat supports the all the same attributes the vCard does. You can get more information on the hCard at http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard