Small Business Trends

The Four Corners Of Local Search

Small Business AdviceNovember 17, 2009By Lisa Barone

four corners of local searchAs I previously mentioned, I was lucky enough to spend last week attending PubCon Las Vegas with some extremely smart search marketers. One of the sessions that really stood out for me was the Local Search and Mobile Optimization panel. During the presentation, one of the speakers, William Leake, identified four important areas for local search that I thought may be worth sharing.  Together they make up the four corners of local search.

What are they?

On-Page Optimization

Just because you’re trying to rank locally, doesn’t make the SEO basics any less important. If you want to be seen as relevant and authoritative in your area, you still have to go through the steps to tell Google who you are and what your site is about.  That means using your City and State in your Title tag. It means using your physical address on page to help localize content. It means using tools like WordTracker and Google’s Keyword research tool to find out which terms searchers are using to find sites like yours, and then using them on page, in your internal linking structure, in headings, in Titles, in your alt text, etc.

A lot of this sounds like common sense, but too often we forget. During the panel, fellow speaker Michael Dorausch joked about someone who once wanted to rank for [san diego chiropractor] but who NEVER included the phrase anywhere on his site. The mystery person ended up being David Klein – another one of the speakers on the panel. [He now ranks first for the query.] You don’t want to be that guy. [Um, no offense, David. :) ]

Citations

Citations have become increasingly important over the past 6-8 months. So much so that you can’t even talk about local search without giving them proper credit. Citations are any mention of your business name and address on a Web page, regardless if a link is present. It’s generally thought that, with all things being equal, a site with more Web citations will rank higher than a site with fewer citations. The search engines use them to validate information that they may have about a business. You want to look to get local citations from directories, your local chamber of commerce, other Web sites in your city, local organizations, the Better Business Bureau, etc. An easy way to find directories focused on your area is to do a search for [your city + directory]. These kinds of citations will go a long way to help the search engines understand where your business is located.

Link Building

Links are obviously an important part to ranking, whether you’re trying to do it locally or on a national level. Longtime SEO veteran Bruce Clay spoke about local SEO myths during a video interview with WebProNews and talked about the importance of getting localized links – that is, links from people in your area. It’s just another way to show the search engines that you are an expert in your little corner of the world and that they should rank you for localized queries. That may mean getting a link from your Chamber of Commerce, links from other businesses in the area, from local organizations, schools, etc. Speaker Darrin Clement really underscored the importance of creating your “neighborhood” whether that’s ID’d by radius, postal zip codes, points of interest or even socially based.

Reviews

Reviews are another area that’s really growing in importance – not just for SEO, but for every local business. As of right now, it doesn’t seem to matter whether all your reviews are positive and glowing or if you have some negatives ones in there (for ranking, anyway. For branding, get on those!).  You just have to have them – lots of them. The search engines want to see lots of reviews from lots of difference sources as a way to legitimize your business. That means you should be actively soliciting reviews from happy customers. William suggested giving push cards to customers are they’re leaving in order to ask for a Yelp review, cherry picking positive customer reviews and managing the customer reviews that you do get. This is one area that you don’t want to leave to chance. You don’t just have to get reviews from customers, either. Consider asking partners and vendors to leave reviews about your business, as well. Anyone who has worked with your business.

I thought this session did a great job breaking down four very important areas of local search. Anything not included or do you have a different four?

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60 Responses to “The Four Corners Of Local Search”

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  1. Robert Brady says:
    November 17, 2009 at 11:01 am

    Now I feel bad for not making it to this session! Thanks for the breakdown and I would just add an Amen! to your comments. With Google serving more and more of their local 7-packs, ranking in local search is becoming very important.

  2. SEO Denver says:
    November 17, 2009 at 6:32 pm

    Thanks! I am sorry to have missed this event.

    Local search enables all businesses to compete for new revenue. Thanks for the notes here – particularly on Citations. Very helpful.

    MAS

  3. Vedran says:
    November 17, 2009 at 10:01 pm

    Hey Lisa,

    This is an excellent post.

    However, I would add consistency and accuracy of business information across the web as one of the corners of local search.
    If your business info is not accurate, up-to-date and consistent, you will be doing a lot of things in vain.

    Let’s take Google as an example. They use web citations and reviews as a way to determine the relative importance of listings.

    In order for Google to associate a web citation with a certain listing, business info in that citation has to match the business info on the listing.

    If that doesn’t happen, your citation doesn’t count.

    That’s why it is important to make sure that everything is accurate and consistent.

  4. Suzanne Arthur says:
    November 18, 2009 at 8:41 am

    Lisa, this is excellent. Thanks for sharing. Very interesting about the use of citations, too.

    In helping small businesses shoot to top-ranking spots on local searches, my partner and I suggest they get their business listed on Google Maps. Also, Yahoo, Bing and MSN.

  5. Martin Lindeskog says:
    November 19, 2009 at 6:21 am

    Lisa: What is a “push card”?

  6. Jeff Howard says:
    November 19, 2009 at 12:33 pm

    Hi Lisa,

    I’ve noticed that reviews are becoming more of a factor for a higher map ranking. I believe Google is ranking results in maps based on how sure they are the business is actually who it says and does what it does. Reviews help Google become more sure about the business because thrid parities are verifying its location and services.

    I just released two free guides at my site that help local businesses make a decision about when to build a new website and when to engage in SEO, check it out over at Search Engine Guide – http://www.searchengineguide.com/jeff-howard/when-should-i-build-a-new-website-invest-1.php

  7. Local Internet Marketing says:
    November 20, 2009 at 6:46 am

    Websites targeting multiple GEO regions may have a few versions of the site. And each version targets one particular language. For the same version, the page may be configured according to the location automatically. It’s a common practice to use IP address to identify the geo region of a visitor. For design of each version, make sure to work closely with the designers who really know about that market. The design of the website should suit the style and taste of the local users. A website targeting US market has much better chance of success if a Boston web design company is involved, instead of a web design firm from India. Geo-targeting depends on the user’s settings. As an example, an English web site may display different versions according to the user’s location, whether Canada, Australia or the United Kingdom, since Geo-targeting identifies the user’s keyword settings, language and location.

  8. Baltimore SEO says:
    January 4, 2010 at 11:15 am

    Excellent post. Two additional things we at periscopeUP also do when promoting local clients is to optimize the Google Maps listing. We’ve found that the services area is no longer relied on heavily for relevancy and therefore put keyword terms in the description. Secondly, we use the hCard microformat to standardize the contact information. Here’s an example: http://www.periscopeup.com/contact.

  9. seo trends 2010,Site Speed,Mobile says:
    January 8, 2010 at 11:05 am

    [...] a huge ranking factor that is 100 percent in your control. Take advantage of it! Corner the four corners of local search, go through the process of claiming all your local listings, dominate Yelp, manage your customer [...]



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