Local search is where small businesses need to be, and this will help you show up in personalized and mobile search.
Quick Facts
- 73% of all online activity is related to local content
- 82% of local searchers follow up with a phone call or show up on your doorstep
- 66% of Americans use local search to find local businesses
If your local Google places listing doesn’t have a 100% score, you will not be included in the first 7 local businesses that Google displays for local results.
Steps to get more business from local search:
1. Make sure your Google listing has a 100% score – There are more than 20 different fields you in your Google Places listing and surprisingly most businesses don’t bother to fill them all in. At the end of the day, the difference between showing up on the first page of Google Places or not can boil down to not having a video as part of your listing.
2. Include keywords in your local listing description. Include cities or suburbs where your target market lives but don’t stuff keywords. Your description should be written for people first, SEO second.
3. Get clients to write a reviews on all your local pages including directly on your Google places listing. The review section of your profile provides social proof of the quality of your business, and it is difficult to game.
4. Make sure your business is listed in your local phone book. Google looks to established sources of data to build their database and check for updated local business information. Without a verified yellow pages address your ability to rank will suffer.
5. Get listed in the other important local directories:
- Yelp
- Dmoz
- Bing
- Best of the Web
- Yahoo
- Hotfrog
- Foursquare
The site www.getlisted.org will show you a score on how effectively your business is taking advantage of these free listings.
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July 6th, 2011 at 10:30 am
Great post, thanks for these SEO tips
we will test them out this quarter.
July 8th, 2011 at 1:47 am
Good rankings in G Places are more important than most marketers thinks! My husband has more visitors from Places than from being in TOP5 for his keyword phrase.
July 21st, 2011 at 2:35 am
a very interesting suggestion, you are giving us helpful SEO information for our localized store.
sahara sprei recently posted..Ghoby Square
July 21st, 2011 at 6:43 am
I think the local results are of great importance as a means to benchmark against your competition. Also, they are especially useful if you are in a trade which operates on call such as a doctor or plumber.
July 25th, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Nice article about local SEO, I will test this out this week.
July 27th, 2011 at 10:28 am
Google just changed it all up for Places accounts. No more yelp, no more tripadvisor and no more citations, and more changes to come. The way to optimize Maps has officially changed.
Tony recently posted..Small Business Local SEO Presentation – LA Web Professionals Group
July 27th, 2011 at 10:46 am
Exactly right Tony, this is a very interesting move by Google and a big bet that they are better than their competitors.
July 28th, 2011 at 6:32 am
I had no idea google would keep switching the places information around, I am going to have to look into this.
September 16th, 2011 at 7:18 am
Great local SEO tips, I’m lucky to subscribe to a site that gets 90% of our traffic from local searches.