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:
- 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.
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As the Web continues to expand and consumers are turning to the search engines for local content, what businesses should be satisfying that demand?
Right now most organic search results are owned by 800 pounds gorillas such as Yelp, Switchboard.com, Directory M, and other large national sites. But do they have the best information about local businesses? Maybe in time, but the small businesses themselves should be the best source for finding the information that local consumers are looking for.
So how does your small business take control of the local search results and connect directly with the consumer? Here are some tips…
- Build a website – DUH! You need to have a place to drive searchers to. All it needs to be is one page with contact information, some sort of mission statement, and imagery/branding that will make the consumer feel you are an established and trusted business. Think of it as an online brochure. Make sure to mention the cities/towns/regions your business services in all the right places (body copy, browser title, and meta descriptions.
- Submit to Google and Yahoo Local (and any other search engines with a local directory) – The major search engines are integrating and sometimes even preempting organic search results with local result. Be there or risk being missed by your potential customers.
- Get into those local directories – You know the 800 pound gorillas I mentioned above? Make sure you’re there. There will also be a handful of town and state-specific directories that it may be worthwhile to submit to. Being included in these directories will have the benefit of increasing the number of incoming links to your website and increasing your “link popularity” or as Google calls it “PageRank“. Search engines analyze the links pointing to your site as they crawl the Web, so the more relevant links you can get, the better chance you have in being visible in the results.
- Expand your local content – As you start to get some good momentum you’ll notice that a one page site can only be relevant for so many keywords. This is why you’ll eventually have to consider expanding your site to have content/pages on each region and/or service you provide. For example, a dog walking business that services Boston and the surrounding cities should have pages that target “cambridge dog walking”, “dorchester dog walking”, etc. It’s important to note that just creating these pages isn’t enough – you’ll need to make sure you’re linking to them so they’re not “islands” with no incoming links.
- Dabble in Paid Search – You’ll find that some keywords are so competitive that you will need to put in a lot of work to show up in the organic search results, but the beauty of pay-per-click search advertising (a la Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter) is instant visibility! Start off by only targeting the most specific terms so you’re absolutely sure that the traffic you’re paying for is valuable. Also, consider using geo-targeting and exact matches in some cases. For instance, paying for traffic on the term “dog walking” would be expensive and there is no guarantee that the searcher is in the Boston area. A better keyword target would be “boston dog walking” because you know the intent of the searcher. Bottom line: WALK BEFORE YOU RUN with PPC advertising. I would recommend consulting with a PPC expert if you want to take your campaign to the next level.
That’s it for now. Happy Holidays everyone!
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