This is a guest post written by David Brown.
Within a month of submitting my Portland search engine optimization website to Google’s local business listings, I was pleased to find myself at the top of the rankings for the phrases, “Portland Web Design,” “Portland Search Engine Marketing,” and “Portland Search Engine Optimization.” However, these rankings quickly faded due to my lack of understanding toward local business optimization. Having identified this as a source of confusion for the majority of the search engine marketing community, I’m pleased to present some tips for moving up in the local business listings.
Offsite Local Business Optimization
- Get free listings in as many local directory websites as possible. I seldom recommend reciprocating or paying for links in directories. However, if they offer a free, nonreciprocal option you should definitely take advantage.
- Include your phone number whenever you write a description of your company on a third party website. My research suggests that Google uses your phone number to improve your local business listing rankings, similar to the way they use links for improving your traditional organic search engine rankings.
- Make sure your local business listing is complete. For instance, include pictures, coupons, a full description, pick your categories, etc.
- Work keywords into your local business listing description and make it as long as Google allows.
- Look at your competitors’ local business listings. If the number next to the link titled, “Web Pages,” is greater than one, click on the link and try obtaining listings from the same websites as your competitors.
Onsite Local Business Optimization
- Include your business name in your title tags, description and throughout your website.
- Include your address and phone number at the bottom of every page.
- Include the name of your city and state in your website’s content, titles, descriptions and page headers.
- See which phrases the local business listings pop up for, and optimize your site for those phrases.
As mentioned above, there is a high level of mystery behind local business search engine optimization. When mastered, it has the potential to be very lucrative, generating large amounts of targeted traffic, within a short amount of time. Please feel free to comment with more tips and resources.
David Brown is a search engine marketing consultant with Westhill Media.
Originally Published August 6th, 2008
[...] If you have a business that only operates locally, spending time and effort on SEO and marketing practices that go out to a national or international audience is probaby a waste of time. Most SEO and Internet marketing techniques focus on driving as much traffic as possible, casting a wide net. Techniques for local SEO are a bit different and Traffkid has some good tips in their post Search Engine Optimization for Local Business Results. [...]
Many searches for a business are going to be related to the city is it in or region. Create some additional landing pages optimized for searches in nearby suburbs and localities with and without the business name. While some keyword phases may be competitive (like real estate/ city) many are not and simple creating a page optimized for it will get search traffic.
James,
That’s a good point. Thanks.
Awesome post. You definitely added to my Local SEO lists.
From my experiences adding the city in prominent locations of your web page and building good keyword rich links to your Google business profile works best.
Also, creating a full post/profile in any of Google’s other services helps too. ie: maps, base, apps, orkut, etc.
SEO is tough but no less important than any other parts of your web business. I would recommend taking parts in forums and learning the ins and outs of the process.
Jippidy.com - Social Video Yellow Pages
Great tip. Local business results is a strategy that many people don’t pay attention to when they should, since most of there business comes from local transactions. If your business is local, one should always include city to the meta tags and at the bottom of the page.
I think the best way to make money online is to use multiple methods. Investing too much in one method puts all your eggs in one basket. I current do a mix of adsense and affiliate marketing. I try to split my sites up into multiple niches. This way, if one market or method tanks, my income is not effected too much.
I’d like to say thanks very much for the useful tips here. I followed the advice above and our website is now 1st in local search and therefore no 1 in Google for “design agency london”.
I’d like to say thanks very much for the useful tips here. I followed the advice above and our website is now 1st in local search and therefore no 1 in Google for “design agency london”.
[...] well for “Philadelphia web designer” will be much more attainable. (For more see Search Engine Optimization for Local Business Results.) Becoming well-connected with other professionals in your area will help you to establish a [...]
I have been sounding the foghorn in my town for the importance of local business SEO. What people don’t realize is this… the first law firm, the first coffee house, the first real estate agent, and basically the first in each business category stand the greatest chance to corner the local SEO and social media market. Right now, our town’s businesses are sleeping on the job. But I predict the alarm will sound very soon, and they will all be scrambling to rise to the top!
[...] A third way to get people to see your portfolio site is to use localized SEO techniques. Although competition for general web design-related terms is very stiff, you may be able to easily rank on the first page of search engines for a local term. You may even prefer working with local clients anyway. To target local visitors use city, state or province names in your page titles and throughout your site when appropriate. Additionally, work on building links to your site with localities in the anchor text of the links. (To read more, see Search Engine Optimization for Local Business Results.) [...]
[...] found these above points from leveltendesign.com & traffikd.com and they have some very good pointers on how to improve/increase your Google local business [...]
Great advice posted here! I have been scratching my head about how to break into Google’s local listings results in my city. The tips in the article above are a great way to get started!
Finally someone who can write a good blog ! I loved your post and will be telling others about it. Subscribing to your RSS feed now. Thanks