There are popular terms of an area that a person usually pair with the postcode when searching in Google. Being a website owner I make sure that for the every offer I rolled out will have some page that targets zip code searchers in a helpful way as a part of my local search engine optimization strategies, provided I have noticed visitors coming to my website using area code. In my experience, it will be fair to say that no one is searching by postal code. It usually depends on the geographic area involved, but zip code searches are very few and nobody searches with it.
I usually suggest my peers to have targeted area code in their local place optimization strategy only if they can see some visitors coming from area code in their Google Webmaster and Google Analytics data.
The problem I see with postcode search is it's just too fine a scale. Most local businesses run at a coarser scale than a single postal code. For a business in a moderately sized city their effective service area covers a few dozen postcode areas.
I have seen websites with a long list of postal codes in their footer due to their office locations available widely. Looks a bit silly, but I tried it myself on one website and have seen less that 1% of visitors using zip coded searches. But a couple did convert as they were very specific in searching.
Postcode is only possible for businesses that do work at a neighborhood level. Perhaps a florist, road side fast food restaurant, tailors. Some real estate searches conducted will be by area codes to find homes in specific neighborhoods.
But as already said searcher is just not doing many postcode searches. That may change some with mobile searchers but again most people only know the code for the neighborhood they live in or maybe a couple of locations nearby. So if they are out on the other end of city they will not use postal code searches because they do not even know the area code they are in at the time.
If you are a small business, I would (and have) use this in Google Local Search (Google Places) listing. Google is focusing on local search. Along with that is a major emphasis on mobile search. So if I want to find a pizza place close by, searching by zip code could be my best solution. Next, you will see them being able to target neighborhoods within cities.
There are other local directories where listing all the cities in your market area would be helpful. Yelp is one that comes to mind.
I am not sure with this post, but yet to find some conclusion to use postal codes or not.
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