Working on Local Search
Over the last year the discussions about local search have grown and people have begun to have more than a basic understanding of how search engines rank for local establishments versus traditional SEO. Having some clients that are setup to run on a regional and even hyper local level I have obtained a crash course in thinking about local search over the last few years. There are four main tenants that most people agree on when talking about local search.
1) Make sure your address and contact info is listed throughout your site.
Besides doing SEO 101 on your website you need to make some additional considerations when thinking about local search. One of the most important is that you list your address and contact information throughout the site. While it seems logical some businesses have it buried on a contact or directions page, you want to make sure that you have it displayed prominently throughout your site.
2) Make sure you are in control of your directory listings.
Hijacking local listings has been a popular trick over the years by some unsavory SEO people. It is important as a small business owner that you check your listings on major search engines as well as data suppliers to local search engines.
When filling out your data it is a best practice to fill out more than just the minimum data. This is thinking for the long tail of search, the more detail that you can offer about your business the better.
One tool to check a few of these sites at once is GetListed. (I blogged about them briefly earlier in the year.)
Search Engines/Major Directories
Google
Yahoo
Bing
Local.com
Superpages
Yellowpages
Data Suppliers/Review Sites/Other Directories
BOTW
Citysearch
InfoUSA
InsiderPages
Localeze
Openlist
iBegin
Kudzu
MagicYellow
Merchant Circle (Apparently you get solicited often when signing up here. Just wanted to warn you.)
AllPages
Yelp
Brownbook
3) Get local citations.
GetListed has a really good breakdown on the value of citations. Basically these are mentions of your business on other webpages. They don’t have to be linked directly to your webpage like a backlink when thinking about traditional SEO. A Chamber of Commerce Website, Better Business Bureau, and other local websites that will list your company and contact information are really valuable mentions.
4) Encourage your customers to review your establishment.
Rating sites have grown rapidly; the most talked about has been Yelp. Getting your customers talking about your business on these sites can bring improved search results and a good amount of traffic. Reviews also are considered valuable to some of the search engines and how they rank your establishment. These reviews act as proof that you are an existing company and open for business. For example Google pulls this information from multiple sites and includes them as part of your listing.
Getting your customers turned into advocates can go a long way in improving your local search rank.
(image from: PegCorwin.com)
Great post, local search is the holy grail of SEO. With people using smartphones more and more, and with these phones knowing where the users are, this is an awesome way to get people to your web site
[...] Working on Local Search By: Kevin Palmer on 01/07/2010 [...]