Local Search is the heart of search. We’ve done local search throughout our lives using the local phone book and Yellow pages. Local is at the core of traffic and potential ad revenue for the search engines. If you’ve advertised in the local Yellow book you’ve no doubt experienced the high cost of a prominent ad as well as the dwindling return on that advertising investment in recent years as the search engines continue to fill the need for those searching for anything in their local markets.
Local search has evolved in the last 5 years at a tremendous rate. Google itself has gone from Google local to Google Places to Google+ pages and today presents these local results just after their paid AdWords listings and before the organic search results for many geocentric searches. Often pushing the organic search results down the page and out of view below the scroll of your screen.
Successful websites today need to compete on all fronts, Organic, PPC, and Local if they want to have the highest potential return from their on-line presence. The days where a top-ranked organic website would bring all of the traffic one could desire are dwindling.
But how can I get good results from these local listings? To start you need to be listed in as many of the high-quality local systems as possible, below is a list of a few that you can start with. Don’t just sign-up, optimize your listing so it has the highest chance of turning up at the top for your related searches. Don’t have time or the skill to do it yourself, contact us we can do it for you.
Once you’re listed ask your customers to write reviews for you as these reviews are weighted into how you will rank when a related search on Google matches your business.
