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When you own or manage a small business, local SEO strategies are important to your success. You must provide the searcher with the most relevant answer to their question in order to appear high in the local search results.
For example, if you are searching for a flower shop, you want to find the one closest to you. When you target search strategies to your local area there is a much better chance that you will show up in a local search for your products and services than if you were competing with everyone in the world that offers the same things you do.
Here are some essential steps to take to help your business improve it’s local search results.
Claim Your Business Listings
You should immediately claim your business listings in both Google My Business and Bing Places. If your business already shows up in these local directories, whether you added it or not, all you have to do is to claim your listing.
Choose the Right Categories
It is important to properly categorize the local search page for your business. While you are claiming your business page, you will have the option to choose the categories for your business. This part of the process is extremely important for the right audience to find you.
The number of categories you can choose is based on the platform where you are listing your business. Interestingly, Bing has a lot more business categories to choose from than Google.
Be Consistent
Be sure that you consistently list your business the same way on other places across the web. You should have the same business name, address and phone number (referred to as NAP), and as many of the same categories as possible in each listing.
When all of this information is consistent across the web, Google and Bing have much more trust that the information is accurate and will reward your listing with higher search results.
Get More Quality Listings
List your business in several high quality online business directories. You can use Moz Local to help you do this. For additional places to list your business, search the web for your products and services followed by ‘directories’. If you are not listed in the directories you find, be sure to add your business.
Get More Quality Reviews
A lot of times reviews are displayed within the search engine results page, or SERP. Work to get more local reviews to provide social proof for your business. For local searches, Google places a pretty high value on reviews when ranking your business.
Work to Attract Quality Links
You should try to gain a good amount of valuable incoming links from authority websites. You can get these from local directories, other local businesses, community bloggers and online newspapers.
With blogging, social sharing and content development, you can greatly improve your chances of attracting quality inbound links.
If you take the steps outlined above you’ll be miles ahead of many of your competitors. If you need help with all of this you may want to consider our Local Search Optimization program.
If you need help with a new website, SEO, Blogging or Social Media, give us a call at 877-334-8022. We’d love to help you!
To your success!
Ken Partain
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