How To Optimize a Google Local Listing – Local Search Basics Part II

For many small businesses, local search is becoming a crucial part of their online strategy. In one place, customers are able to learn about the services and products you offer, look up directions to your business, read reviews from other customers, and compare you with nearby competitors, all without even visiting your web site. If you haven’t yet, check out how to claim a Google Local listing.

So now that you’ve claimed your listing, you’re done, right? Wrong. Just like your web site, optimizing your listing is the key to getting found.  While creating your listing or claiming an existing one will get you listed, where you show up is crucial. I’ve outlined a few of the generally accepted best practices in local search engine optimization below.

But first, lets clarify exactly how rankings on Google Local work, as they are a different beast than your average search. At its core, Google Local is an extension of Google Maps, displaying relevant businesses, destinations, and landmarks to users searching a specific geographic area. Thanks to the advent of Google Universal Search, these geographically relevant results are now integrated into the main search results of Google, bringing more relevant results to users in less time. Google will only choose to display the most important listings on the main search results page, while the rest are hidden unless the user clicks “see more results”.  So your goal, just like with your web site, is to rank as close to the top as possible for your chosen keywords, thereby garnering you the greatest amount of exposure to potential visitors. So how exactly do you climb the rankings? Read on to find out!

Get Rid of the Duplicate Listings

The next step is to ensure that you have no duplicate listings to your same business already on Google. These may be under different names, or have slightly varied content in them. Duplicate listings can exist for a number of reasons, such as if the business was renamed, moved, or someone mistakenly created a new listing. In any of these situations, you should ensure that there is only one listing for each physical address. Duplicate listings can be penalized by Google, and can seriously hurt your ranking. This is probably one of the trickiest aspects of optimizing a local listing, because its not always clear where there are duplicates, and even if it is, suspending or merging listings can be almost impossible. Google will attempt to merge listings when possible, but it is far from perfect, and it is ultimately up to you to sort it all out.

Complete Your Listing

Remember all those fields you saw while claiming your listing? Take some time to go through each and ensure each are accurate and properly filled out. The categories section is particularly important, although be careful about simply keyword stuffing here. Pick logical categories that are recognized by Google. Watch out for a miscategorized listing, as this is a common cause of poor ranking. Picking strong categories is an oft forgotten tactic. Adding photos, videos, and description, are also important, although mainly for the person viewing your listing. The search engines put little emphasis on these.

Build and Manage Your Off-Site Information

You may have noticed on your listing or others that certain information includes a green subtitle that lists the name of another directory, like InsiderPages, or Judy’s Book. These are what are called content providers, and are a key factor in the way Google chooses to rank your listing. The beauty of Google Local, and the real reason why it is the most important directory to be on, is that it pulls information from sites around the web. So if someone reviews your business on a site like SuperPages, chances are you will see it on your Google Local listing sooner or later as well.

With this in mind, it is advantageous to your listing to seek out your information on these content providing directories and ensure the information is accurate and complementing your Google Local listing. These directories often have additional functionality or sections to include, which could end up giving you an edge on your competitors, simply from the number of citations your listing has. There are literally hundreds of generic directories that your business’ information, and additional, specific directories to your trade/industry. While you certainly can try and scour the web trying to perfect every last directory listing, the ones you should focus most on are the ones that are already providing content to your listing. From there you can branch out into other niche directories or content providers that are relevant to your industry.

Reviews are King

Try as you might to complete all the steps above, you may still lose to competitors in the rankings simply because you don’t have as many reviews as them. While any business will want to maximize positive reviews and minimize the negative reviews, from the search engine’s perspective its all about quantity. Encouraging your clients to write reviews, either on Google or on one of their content providers will help ensure you climb the rankings and keep your foothold as competitors begin to wise up.

Watch and Learn From Your Competitors

If you are getting consistently outranked by competitors, do some research and find out why. Chances are, the top dogs are doing something you’re not. Most likely they have more reviews than you, but you’d be surprised how many high ranking competitors haven’t even claimed their listings yet. You aren’t going to find many other instances where you can catch your competition sleeping on the job, so take advantage of it!

While I focused this discussion on Google Local, you can also use a similar strategy for Yahoo and Bing Local. Don’t be fooled though: Google is still far and away the most important of the three, so it is the one you should always focus on first, regardless of your industry. Try a few of these local search optimization tactics, and let me know how it goes. This is certainly not a definitive list, and new features and optimization tactics are emerging all of the time.  It is my hope that these tips get you started on the right path. Did you find this information useful? Leave a comment below, or share it with a friend!