Google local business center has been around for some time now and unlike many other products of Google that doesn’t make much sense to a normal user, local listings are extremely useful for people looking for a particular business in their neighborhood. Business directories or yellow pages were already there but they were not doing it the “Google’s way”. Google Local Business Center enables you to search for the local restaurants, car rent services, flower delivery businesses and just about any other business, by just adding the city name to your search query and Google will fetch a number of businesses for your convenience along with some reviews and their contact numbers.
So far so good for the users, however the businesses who were reluctant to go online now finds themselves loosing some good chunk of market share because some low profile business has managed to make it to the first position in Google local results. Please note that a big majority of these searchers are actual customers who are on the point of making a purchase. Now that’s what we call a real potential customer, lost because you were too adamant to spend some time in creating a website to represent your business on the internet. At the same time, local listings are a touch of relief for small local businesses, for the reason that they don’t need to compete with indomitable websites for their targeted keywords, anymore.
Coming to the optimization for your local listing, you should start from adding your website to the Google local business database. You will have to go through some verification checks, that should not cause any problem if you are a legitimate business. While adding your business, you must carefully place the targeted keyword in the title (which is meant for your business name or products), categories (you can choose up to 5 categories) and of course description. I’ve used the word “carefully”, because this keyword inclusion must not come across as spam. You can link videos, photos and more importantly discount coupons to these listings. Even if they don’t affect ranking in a positive way, they will most certainly attract your customers. Make sure that you’ve got your business address clearly mentioned at your website (as well as your local phone number). You can also add your city name in your website homepage title and a couple of other important pages (e.g. services pages).
While on-page optimization let you get into the race of SEO, it is actually the off page optimization that really pushes you to the top. One of the most important factors is the inbound links from local websites and online yellow pages. Getting into the yellow pages shouldn’t be a problem (since they are meant for business listings); however you should go for the backlinks from other local websites as well. However, you don’t need to pile on the backlinks; just a few quality links will do the trick. Another noteworthy factor is the business reviews, both at Google and external sources. Do not feel shy of asking your loyal customers to leave positive reviews on the websites (you should consider yourself extremely lucky if they are doing it on their own). That’s pretty much all you’ll need to improve your local rankings (in most cases). In addition to this you can consider starting a blog that focuses mainly on your local industry to entice search engine crawlers to keep coming back for more.
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