Friday is “Question of the Week” day here at Duct Tape Marketing. Each Friday I’ll tackle a specific question I received via readers or in places where I’m speaking. Submit your question here and if we use it we’ll highlight you and send you a signed copy of Duct Tape Marketing.
For today’s answer I wish I could say there was some magic pixie dust, but the fact is getting your local business to show up high in the search results takes some work.
For the local business the goal must be to move into what is referred to as the Google Local Pack – those 6-8 listing that show up for a local search. This is particularly important on mobile devices that are often pinpointing local only.
There are many factors and of course a great deal has to do with the competitive nature of your particular industry.
However, there are several tried and true steps that you should take in order to give your business the best chance possible
Clean up your NAP
NAP is the directory acronym for Name, Address and Phone. This data clearly tells that a business is local and guess what – if you’ve been around for a while there’s a good chance some data source has this wrong.
Here’s how to assure you have an accurate NAP listing in as many places as possible.
Go the USPS site and get the correct address format for your business
Check with these major data providers to ensure your listing is complete and accurate.
Get listed
Now that your listing is accurate with the data folks, make sure that you listing in some of the more popular online business directories. Claim enhance these profiles.
One of the best tools for doing this is getlisted.org – this free tool will find your listing or lack of in some of the major directories and lead you to the place where you can edit and add.
Brightlocal is another very powerful paid tool for improving your local presence.
Get reviewed
Reviews carry a lot of weight, both with search engines and would be customers. You must get serious about this aspect of local search. Note the image above – the site that ranks #1 in Google has the best review profile.
The three most important place to focus your review work are
- Google+Local – Google want your business on Google+ so they’ve moved the local pages there. Start building your local page and focus on getting more reviews.
- Yelp – On top of being the biggest review site Yelp provides Bing Local results.
- Foursquare – this location based check in site is working hard on becoming a local directory and should not be ignored.
Localize your pages
One of the most overlooking opportunities is the local nature of the content on your site. Make sure you:
- Add your NAP in Schema.org format to every page
- Add local terms such as suburbs, neighborhoods, places and events in your titles and subtitles.
- Create localized happenings and news pages
- Create site sections or landing pages dedicated to local phrases.
For WordPress users one of the best things you can invest in is the Local SEO for WordPress plugin from Yoast. This plug in will handle a great deal of the techie stuff for you and let you do some nice things with maps and directions.
