Any business whose store or office has a business location needs to take advatage of Google Maps. Easy to do; lots of advantages in drawing new customers. If you’re not there you’re losing the race—because your competitors are.

Google Local Search—6 Main Moving Parts

Philip Rozek
If I told you that to get visible in your local market you need a kick-butt website, you could easily hire 2 people: a programmer and a guy to write website content. Or if I said you need pay-per-click advertising, you could quickly find someone to do it for you.

But if you want to get found in the Google Local Search results, chances are good you wouldn’t know where to start, or even what to ask someone else to do for you.

I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m not even going to tell you what not to do. But I will tell you what you’re probably wondering about, which is “What are the basic things I need to rank highly?” and “How much will it cost me?”

6 basic things determine your visibility in Google Local Search (the first 5 of these you can do for free):

1. Your blue link next to the map. When you type in a local search term, you see a little map, with 10 blue links to the right. You get a link (which may or may not be visible to customers). That link serves as the title and billboard of your business, and you get to choose what it says. It matters.

2. Having a website. I could go into all kinds of detail, but the only thing to know is if you don’t have a website, chances are very good you’ll get outranked by any competitors who do have one.

3. A good website name. It matters what you call your website. I don’t have room to show you here how to get an effective name, but a great place to get ideas is Google Keyword Tool.

4. Customer reviews. It’s pretty obvious how positive reviews can help you (though there’s a specific way to go about getting them).

5. Additional content. You can have customers see your business hours, directions, and photos (of your business, products, etc.) that you upload. To the extent you add that kind of information, that’s a good thing.

6. Paid local ads. This is the only moving part you (obviously) can’t do for free. Depending on your market, it’s sometimes a good idea to get “Local Business Ads” in addition to the no-cost local search listing you already have. This is something you generally worry about later on, once you’ve got the other 5 moving parts working for you.

Now that you know the 6 moving pieces of Google Local Search, you have a much better sense of where to start or what to do next. You also know better what’s a waste of your money and what to get someone else to do for you.

Philip Rozek will show you 3 specific no-cost solutions you can use now to get a quick visibility boost in the Google Local Search results. You can implement these tactics (or get someone else to do it for you) by going to http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/

In early 2005 I started this website and blog to be a useful resource for what I knew would be important for small and mid-size businesses (SMEs). Although they operate in their local communities, the Internet was becoming more important for customers to find them. And the Yellow Page Directory was becoming less useful all the time.

From business cards to the Internet

Back in 1996 I had wrote a massive book about the body language of business cards (now out of print). What later became apparent to me was that the Yellow Page directory ads exhibit many of the same qualities as business cards. And they succeed or fail in attracting new business for most of the same reasons. So before long I was writing extensively on Yellow Page advertising.

I noted the early efforts that the search engines were making to make Local Search more relevant. If only businesses owners could use their “unfair advantage” to attract buyers from their own community via the Internet. Brick and mortar businesses that could be found online, without being e-commerce businesses. A lot more advantages have grown up since then, but to a large measure smaller businesses haven’t taken advantage of the edge that Local Search has given them.

This website had about 80 pages and numerous articles plus 4 years of blog posts at the start of 2009, when we changed the website host. I transferred the HTML website to the new host without difficulty. But somehow in the transition the database of blog posts vanished. Poof! Never to be retrieved. I was shocked, but what can you do when something like that happens?

Starting over

It took me a few months to be able to deal with the loss, but this post is my declaration to put that loss behind me, behind us. At this time, I’m converting the website pages to a dynamic website (most of the original content). And I’m starting the blog with this post. So in one way it’s a new blog, even though there were numberous posts over those 4 years.

The commitment being made is to post on a regular basis—to maintain regular useful content. It is also to make this website the resource envisioned when it started, and reflected by the domain name. Even before the loss of the blog posts, this was a neglected website, without receiving regular new content. Even so, because it was launched so long ago and had information considered very useful, it did make a mark on the Internet. It had declined from the days of a Page Rank of 4 of 10, but even today I searched Google: links: localsearchresources.com

The result: 20,200 and a Page Rank of 2. So that’s the starting point for the rebirth of this website and blog. Let’s see what can be accomplished with the new Local Search products in the pipeline. Some I’ll be developing or bringing back from other formats. But also I’ll be looking for products and services that are out there that business owners need to know about.

The Promise: Useful and easy steps for the non-techie business owner to benefit from Internet exposure

So this website is itself a resource that business owners can rely on. It will not deliver the corporate insider outlook, but speak to the concerns of small enterprises with limited resources and computer or online expertise.