beantownseo.com

Search Engine Land has great coverage of the SMX West conference session on Tips For Optimizing Your Business Listings Online. Some highlights include:

•  Ensure you’re found in the following business directories:
  •  Google Local Business Center
  • Localeze
  • InfoUSA
  • Universal Business Listing
• If you have a case where the physical location of your business does not accurately reflect the multiple neighborhoods or towns that you serve, then Chris Silver Smith recommends trying these work-arounds:
  • Creating plenty of city- or neighborhood-specific content on your own website to let the search engine spiders know you serve these additional areas.
  • Registering a PO Box and obtaining a local phone number in the additional towns or neighborhoods you serve.
  • Claiming your profile on local portals or data providers who only require a business name and phone number, or who will accept a PO Box as an address.
  • These steps should ensure that Google Maps picks up your additional “locations” in its web crawl, which you can then claim as local business listings
• Steve Espinosa also presented some excellent tips to optimize your local business listings, and increase your incoming link totals:
  • Include yourself in as many relevant categories as possible at Yahoo-this can often lead to multiple URLs, and thus multiple citations.
  • Pay the $9.95/mo. for Yahoo’s Enhanced Product.  His company has found that the little “Merchant Verified” checkmark increases phone calls by 180%.
  • Don’t forget about video, both as a citation source and a direct traffic driver. Getting a video thumbnail AND a local listing on the same search result page has led to a 340% increase in phone calls.
  • Properly constructed social media profiles, like Twitter, can be picked up as citations if they include your business name, address, and phone number.
  • Be sure to link out to your various profiles and citations directly from the landing page you list in the Google Local Business Center. This will ensure that Google is crawling your citations and correlating them with your local business listing.