Enhance Your Website for Local Search Success

While you don’t need a website to have a local search listing it sure helps. Nothing fancy mind you, a short WordPress blog or a couple page “brochure” site. Potential customers expect it now and the cost of entry and maintenance is so low it’s absurd to say no. Your web site will also help your local business listing ranking. Not by a lot, but as always when it comes to optimization on the web every little bit helps. According to David Mihm, an expert on local search in Portland OR about 15% of the success of a local search listing can be credited to your own website. So while you can get ranked well without a site that extra 15% will be very helpful. If your niche is fairly competitive then you’ll definitely want to consider the tweaks to your site (or having one).

Some areas to consider improving on your site listed below. You will notice right off the bat the nearly common sense nature of these suggestions. Use the product or service and city name you want to rank for frequently. As Homer Simpson might say, Doh!

As an added bonus the work you do on your website to help strengthen your local search listing will help your site rank well in organic search. In fact, in smaller niches it is quite possible to rank at the top of local search as well as in organic search. A double bonus to be sure.

• Full Address and Phone Number on a Contact Page- Every site should have a contact page. On the contact page be sure your contact information matches your local business listing.
• Inclusion of City and State in Title Tags- The meta title tags on a web page still remain an important element of on page optimization factors for the page. Having your city and state name match that of what you want to rank well for in local search can help. If you want to rank for “chicago CPA” then have Chicago in your title tags. I use these city and state contact tags on all of my pages, at the minimum have them on your contact page.
• Product Service Keywords in Titles- That same “Chicago CPA” ought to have the term CPA in his titles (and other meta tags such as description and keyword) to ensure strengthening his own site’s SEO value.
• Location Keywords in URL- If you are are creating a new domain name (URL) for a business then be sure to utilize your product or service and your location. A domain such as www.chicagocpa.com is very helpful in both site SEO and your local search listing. If you already have a domain name then add folder names with your information. As an example www.hastingsaccounting.com could have a contact page call www.hastingsaccounting.com/contactchicagocpa.html.

This is one of five articles covering the key factors in creating an effective local business listing for Google, Yahoo and Bing. Stay tuned for all of them.