Local search queries are becoming more and more important in website marketing. Every business catering to local customers should focus on localizing their online campaign in order to leverage great opportunities that are out there.
3 Most Important Steps Of Your Local Marketing Campaign:
- Claiming your local business listing and/or submitting your website to online services like Google Places and Yelp.com, among many others (for more info refer to my local marketing tips post).
- Promoting your website and business on social sites like Facebook and Twitter
- Becoming involved with location-aware applications like Foursquare and Gowalla.
All of these channels offer great ways of getting local search traffic to your website. However, you shouldn’t stop at creating standard accounts. Take it a step further and build fully optimized profile pages. Through proper optimization techniques you can control how your profile pages are returned to users, improve your search engine rankings and ultimately help your site appear in the first few positions on local search results.
How to optimize your profile?
That depends on the particular platform but there are some common steps you can take to improve your listing.
- Make sure to include as much information as possible when listing your business’ physical location as this is a major factor when it comes to local search.
- Categorize your business correctly – if secondary category choices are available select a fee over time to see which ones positively influence your position and traffic.
- Consider adding vital keywords to the title of your local profile listing if your business name is not indicative of what you do. For example instead of listing my business as “BOCO Creative” I could list it as “BOCO Creative Web Design Services”. Don’t overdo it however.
- Encourage existing clientele to submit reviews and ratings of your business – these will not only improve your local listing rankings but your click-through rate as well.
- Take time to fill out your local business profile pages completely, including your hours, payment options. Add pictures and videos whenever you can.
- Make sure that the information on your local listing pages is consistent across all sites/directories.
Once you have everything in place remember to review your profile information regularity to make sure everything is up to date. Take the time to re-evaluate and re-adjust accordingly and you’ll be on your way to the top of the local search result pages.
Conrad Flynn
Great post! I think this is something a lot of small local business miss out on.
I would mention though, on LinkedIn – pay close attention to these local optimization factors. Google really likes LinkedIn and it’s pages usually rank pretty high. On LinkedIn you can actually adjust your privacy settings to make MORE content show on the “public version” of your profile page… that’s the version people view without logging in… and the version Google sees.
LGC Roofing
Don’t mess around with Google Maps. Putting too many keywords in your profile title or creating multiple profiles for a single company will ultimately cost your traffic and ranking.
Joanna Ciolek
Great points guys! LinkedIn has certainly gained a lot of attention over the past year and I would strongly advise any business owner to create a presence there. For some sectors (mainly professional) LinkedIn will bring much bigger results than anything you can do on Twitter or Facebook.
yachtcharter
I have one tiny little question:D how hard is to get a 100 score in google local? I’ve heard this is very important, in order to get listed on the 1st page of google. Is it true?
Joanna Ciolek (@BOCOcreative) (@BOCOcreative)
From the vaults:: Local Search Profile Optimization Tips For Small… http://joannaciolek.com/local-search-profile-optimization/ #design
Joanna Ciolek (@BOCOcreative) (@BOCOCreative)
Local Search Profile Optimization Tips For Small Businesses http://bit.ly/qEaCNs
Jenny
You posted some really good ideas that I’m sure are going to help plenty of merchants that are struggling right now.
In our present economy, we need to use every tool we can. Exposure is the key.