I recently did a post on the importance of claiming local search places, and Nancy Wigal of the Search Engine Academy of Washington DC added a great comment, so I asked her to elaborate. Take it away, Nancy!

Recently Juli wrote and published “Claim Your Place,” to give you, dear reader, a better understanding of how to get more visitors to your website and traffic to your business location by checking your local business listings on the major search engines.

In response to her wonderful, informative post, I’m writing this post as a follow up to provide a better understanding of two fairly new search engine optimization (SEO) processes – local and mobile SEO.

Local and mobile SEO go together in many cases like peanut butter and jelly. Let’s see how they complement one another, but first let’s talk about local business directory listings.

Companies and businesses that depend upon customers and clients locally to come to their bricks and mortar location need to know that they must take advantage of, and leverage their business listing on large search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Most small businesses that depend upon walk in traffic aren’t aware that they can create local business listings on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

If your business has had a hard copy Yellow Pages ad, it’s highly likely you have generic business listings that you need to “claim,” then customize.

Claiming means you need to create accounts with Google, Yahoo! and Bing, find your generic business listing, verify you are the owner, then customize the listing for better local search results.

There are many good reasons to claim and customize all of your local business listings. You will show up higher more often in local searches, which will drive more traffic to your website and your physical business location.

One very good reason to claim your business listing is to ensure your competition doesn’t grab your listing and either delete it or put in false information that can negatively impact your sales.

Two other great business directories to be listed in is Best of the Web (BOTW) and Universal Business Listing (UBL).

One more that is very, very local is Patch. Patch often drills down to specific sections of cities, so be sure you keep going down to your neighborhood for the most accurate listing possible.

The other good thing about all of these listings is the citation factor Google looks for when ranking and indexing local businesses for local search results. The more listings you have, the more your business looks important to Google.

So how can you optimize for better local search results?

If your business is concentrated on getting customers from specific areas, put that on your website – neighborhoods, zip codes, counties, etc. Put your physical address and phone number on every single page of your website. Make it easy for your visitors to see where you’re located. The search engine spiders and robots also will “crawl” your address for ranking and indexing your pages in local search results.

Many folks do a search for local businesses by typing in a zip code. It’s so easy, it’s a crime NOT to do it! You owe it to your business!

Customize your business listings in the various engines and directories by using keyword phrases your target market is typing in to find your services and products. Add photos and videos, and optimize the titles and captions with variations of your keyword phrase.

Thanks, Nancy! Tune in Wednesday when she’ll talk about mobile search, so people with smartphones can find and buy from you.

Follow Nancy on Twitter. Her handle is @seowashdc

Tags: seo

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2011 at 8:10 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.