Local Listings Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – is how your business location and information is indexed, ranked and possibly how it stands out from other local listing results within search engine results and/or other local opportunities. We have an exciting opportunity to get our client’s to stand out from their competition and we know how to answer the question: “how do I find my business online”.

Where do local listings appear?

Anyone can submit their business information online and it could take days if not weeks to do all the submissions that we do in 10 days. Will you provide it to the directory/maps the correct way? We know how to do it so it works the first time.

The business info can be included in the following:

• Search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, etc.)
• Local search engines (Local.com, Citysearch, etc.)
• Internet Yellow Pages (YellowPages.com, WhitePages.com, Superpages.com, etc.)
• Maps (MapQuest, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, etc.)
• GPS units (Garmin, Tom Tom, etc.)
• Onstar (now available on many makes and models of cars)
• Apps for all phones and tablet computers (Urbanspoon, YP Mobile, etc.)
• Local news aggregators (AOL’s Patch, Yahoo local news, etc.)
• Social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, etc.)

How does a business make itself more visible within local listings?

Local visibility is basically broken into 5 parts:

1. Indexing – Is your business location content in the databases of those websites who use it (search engines, Internet Yellow Pages, GPS units, social media websites, etc.) and is it correct?

2. Optimizing – Is your business location content optimized to help outrank other competitors?

3. Reviewing – Does your business have any online reviews?

4. Enhancing – Does you business location content contain additional information about your business that makes it stand out from the rest of your competitors (videos, images, deep links to your website, reviews, etc.)

5. Promoting – Do you want to promote your business services, specials or offerings with additional advertising options? Check out the image to the right. I have circled the business taking advantage of this with Google.

Why is it important to have an optimized local listing?

There are a lot of reasons why a business should have an optimized local listing. Below are some stats to better frame the opportunity:

• Search engines provide search results 6,000,000,000 (yes that is BILLIONS) a month with local listing information.
• There are over 350 Internet Yellow Page directories that combined, provide local listing results to directory users over 100,000,000 times a month.
• There are hundreds of thousands of GPS units in active use in the US on any given day all searching for specific location information.
• Social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkIn, etc.) touch over 70% of the US population and all contain local business information.

To the right is an example how specials for your business could appear.

Websites where “Specials tag” will appear include:

Is this confusing? Give Wayne a call 314.865.5088 or email and he can help explain it and send you our Local Listings Search Engine Optimization – SEO package to review.