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/

Any but the smallest or newest business has an Internet presence because it exists in directories and data bases all over the www. Some of that information is wrong. Some is out of date. Some doesn’t agree with the rest. Whether or not you have a hand in putting it out there, all of it could be working harder to draw clients and customers to you.

Forget identity theft for the moment, you still have a pressing need to take charge of your online identity. This very useful and current article by Eric Ege is sure to set you on the right path. One that’s likely to pay dividends by giving you an edge on your local competitors.

Clean Up Your Local Data

http://searchengineland.com/clean-up-your-local-data-20943

Local search is a huge opportunity for many businesses, particularly those with hundreds (or more) of locations. In this article, we are going to cover one of the most difficult aspects of that – getting your data to show correctly in the search engines. This turns out to be an extremely important thing to do. In David Mihm’s recent Local Search Ranking Factors report the top two items listed where:

1. Local address in City of search (e.g. a user search on “boston rental cars” will favor rental car companies located in Boston)
2. Citations from major data providers, IYPs, and other local information sites

Since you cannot control what the user types in for a search query the only way to impact the #1 ranking factor is by changing your location. The #2 factor listed is also incredibly important, and something that businesses should strive to address. This is actually much more difficult then you initially might think. Let’s explore why.

The search engine’s challenge

Let’s take a look at the problem from the perspective of the search engines. Here are some of the basic challenges they face:

• There are 15 million or more small businesses in the US. Tracking them all down is an extremely difficult task.
• While there are mechanisms for the businesses to provide data to the search engines directly, very few businesses realize that they could (and should) do this.
• Even if you track down all these businesses, the data the search engine obtains for them could be wrong. Here are are few ways that this can happen:
  1. The data obtained could have been entered in incorrectly in the first place (e.g. typos)
  2. Businesses close their doors, leaving the search engine with a listing with a place that no longer exists.
  3. The business changes location. This is also a frequent occurrence)
  4. New businesses open their doors. Search engines need to track these down and add them to their data.
  5. Businesses acquire other business, or get acquire by other businesses.
  6. Businesses change their name.

To underscore how difficult this is, consider the fact that data provider InfoUSA conducts 30 million phone interviews every year (source: my recent interview with infoUSA’s Pankaj Mathur. The search engines are not likely to want to replicate this expense given the structure of their businesses where they use algorithms to build their indexes instead of people.

One thing that the search engines do is draw data from as many sources as possible. This includes obtaining data from data providers such as infoUSA, Localeze, and Acxiom. They also crawl the web to see what listings for businesses are listed on various web sites, with special attention to Internet Yellow page (IYPs) sites, such as YellowPages.com, or SuperPages, just to name a couple, and other local information sites such as CitySearch and MapQuest.

This is helpful, but there are still many problems that they face. For example, the data between these disparate sources do not always reconcile. They all have different methods for verifying data accuracy and updating their data, and the differences can be quite significant in number. So the search engine must decide what to do when the data from Localeze differs from the data from CitySearch, and so forth.

Worse still, these disagreements in data reduce the confidence that the search engine has in the data. As a result, it can and does impact your ability to rank in the search results — the search engine would rather show something where all the data agrees because their confidence in the data accuracy is higher. The bottom line is that you want to help them out, by getting as many data sources as possible in alignment.

What you can do

Imagine a world in which all data sources, IYPs, and other local information sites provide the search engines consistent data. It would certainly make their job easier to do. But since these data sources are competing businesses, they will not solve that problem for you. You have to do that, and getting all the data sources, IYPs, and other local information sites to agree can be a sizable chore.

The best thing to do is prioritize. You definitely should take advantage of opportunities to provide your data directly to the search engines. Using the Gooogle Local Business Center is a must. In addition, Google makes active use of location data provided to it in KML files (Martin Beijk covers how to this in this guide to KML and SEO). In short, these are files that you place on your server with information on all of your locations. You then point to it in your site map file. The fact that it is referenced in your site map files helps Google identify it as being from you.

Once you have taken care of these basics, go as deeply as you can through the various data sources, IYPs, and other local information sites. Here are some of the top ones to target:

Data providers

1. Acxiom
2. infoUSA
3. Localeze

Note that currently Acxiom does not have an operating program for businesses to update their data with them directly, so it may be hard to accomplish that update. But make sure you work with infoUSA and Localeze, both of which have such programs. If Acxiom does offer such a program in the future, make sure you jump on board!

Internet Yellow Pages and other sites with local information

1. Yellowpages.com
2. Local.com
3. Superpages
4. CitySearch
5. MapQuest
6. MerchantCircle
7. Yelp
8. CityVoter
9. YellowBot
10. Best of the Web Local

The IYP and local information sites generally pull data from the major data sources, much as the search engines themselves do. However, it is still best if you can take control directly with the major ones. If you have to choose between spending time on the IYPs and the data providers, the focus should be on the data providers.

The goal is to get as much data consistency as possible! It is not all there is to the art of local SEO, but it is the foundation of local search optimization. It is hard for the search engines to know where you really are, so do everything you can to make it easy for them. There are many other subtleties to this such as what type of data you provide. For example, local phone numbers for each location works better than one 800 number for all your locations. You can learn more about these other types of factors relating to your data from the David Mihm report referenced at the beginning of the article.

Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of Custom Search Guide.

FIRST STEP • DO THIS TODAY

This is easy to do and should be repeated every couple of months. Do a Google search for the name of your business + the town where it’s located. How many times do you show up google? Actually, you’re in their data base many more times than that, but they don’t report them all. Click on every single link on their list to see if the information for that source is uniform or accurate. Follow the steps in this article and other places on this website to correct errors.

You should Google your business name even if you don’t have a website. If you do have a website Google your domain name also. Do it again with: links: [www.yourdomain.com] in the search box. Now you’ll also know which of them are linking to you.

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.