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High Season Studio

Blog · Search · · 3 min read

How people find you locally: Maps and place searches

Before comparing prices, people search for a place: “hotel in La Paloma”, “house with a pool in Alonnisos”. That search is won in two places at once — your Google listing and a page of your own that talks about the area.

Your Google listing is the first page

For a local search, the listing appears before your website, with photos, hours, reviews and a route. Claim it, verify it, choose the right category, upload real photos every few weeks and point the link at your own site, not at a portal.

Fill in everything: hours, the season you open, whether you take pets, the WhatsApp number. Half the decisions get made there, without anyone clicking through.

The same details everywhere

Name, address and phone have to match on your site, on Google, on the portals and on your social accounts. When they do not, search engines stop being sure you are one business.

  • Address and phone in the footer of every page.
  • LocalBusiness structured data, with coordinates and hours.
  • The same spelling of the name, everywhere, including the accents.
A practice that shows up in searches in its own city: VV Abogados.
A practice that shows up in searches in its own city: VV Abogados.

Reviews: ask for them and answer them

Ask after each stay, with the link ready. Answer all of them, the good and the bad, in the language they were written in: it is the clearest signal that someone is home. Never buy them, and never write them yourself.

A page about the area, not a sentence

“Five minutes from the centre” is not a page. What ranks is the one that explains the place: how to get there from the airport, which beaches are near and what each is like, where to eat, what to do when it rains. Written once, it brings people all year.

That is also the page a guest sends to the friend who is coming with them.

Local search is the one people make on foot: “where to eat near here”.
Local search is the one people make on foot: “where to eat near here”.

How to know if it is working

In Search Console, look at the queries that include your town. In your Google listing, look at calls, route requests and photo views. If both grow and the enquiries do not, the problem is on the page, not in the search.

Three pages worth ten blog posts

You do not need a whole blog to win the searches around you. Three pages are enough, and they are the ones people already ask you about by email.

  • How to get here: from the airport, the bus station and by car, with real travel times.
  • What to do nearby: beaches, walks, markets, with distances.
  • Questions about the area: season, weather, whether you need a car.

Frequent questions

Is it worth paying for ads on Maps?

Only once the listing and the site are in order. Paying to send people to a page with no prices or availability is paying twice for the same loss.

How long does it take to show up?

The listing, days. The pages, a few months, because a new site has to earn trust first. It is the slowest of the SEO jobs and the one that lasts longest.

What if I have several properties in the same area?

One listing per property with its own address, and one page per property on your site. What you cannot do is create listings for addresses that do not exist: Google removes them and it costs you the good one.

Your site could be next.

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