Getting your website listed in local search is not hard. It can be a very powerful tool to generate new customers for your company. Whether your business is limo rental or a service business you can benefit from getting to the top of the search engines. Listed are several steps you can take to ensure that you end up near the top. Having your listing there is free traffic to months to come.
If possible, you will need to make several adjustments to your website. Anytime you make changes on your website to gain rankings in the search engines, this is known as search engine optimization. You need to make sure that you address and phone number are listed on your website in a way that google can read. This means having your phone number in a picture is simply not good enough. Ideally, your contact information and address will be on every page of you website in the footer. if you do not want to this, at least have it on a contact page. On you contact page, use the Hcard format. Google “hcard generator” to get the proper format then paste the code to your website. If you cannot figure this out, at least put your address and phone number on the page in text format.
Once you have done this you are going to want to claim your listing using Googles local business center. the address is (www.google.com/local/add). You claim it by logging on a registering you business. Make sure that you use the keywords you are trying to target in the business name either before or after. Add as many video’s and pictures as you can, then submit it. The system will call the phone you list to give you a pin so make sure you are with the phone number that you give. Now head over to yahoo and do that same at (listings.local.yahoo.com)
One of the things you can do to get a little bit of a boost is to pick an address as close to the epicenter of the city as possible in the eyes of google (This is in the gray area of the ethics debate. We are not telling you to do it, but be aware that many of your competitors may be. Just get a P.O. Box near the middle of the city in the eyes of Google maps if this is for you.
Your will also want to make sure that you use a local number and not a 1800 number. You can use a company call ringcentral to complete this task. Ringcentral will allow you to have a local number in every area code if this is what you are attempting to do.
The next step in the process is often the most crucial if you already have a developed market and were not able to rank initially. It will require you to go out and get backlinks to your website. There are numerous ways that you can do this. For local results, what you really want to local websites, or sites that Google considers locally oriented to link to you. These sites include
1. Chambers of commerce
2.School websites
3. Your church of temple
4.Local networking groups
5. local news blogs
Make sure that you request that you name and location be included in the link text. Link text/anchor text, which is usually blue, are the words that you click on to go to a another site.
You can download a free Local Search Checklist by click the previous link