DesignPro: Local SEO

Local Seo
Small Businesses that rely on providing products or services to their community need to use a local seo strategy. This is an extensive Guide to Local SEO!

On page Optimization

You can mention the name of your city in your site title, meta description and content but your main focus should be your brand name. Branding is very important. It is one of the main focuses that Google uses to evaluate your citations.

Schema.org markup helps the search engines to identify what your site is about. Google has a Schema generator on their site to assist you. The default setting is for an article; you will want to change that to Local Business. You can put this information in a footer or sidebar across your website.

Also make sure you have the markup location set to body if you put the code into the content of the page.

Google Places Listing

It is important to have your Google Places Listing have the same Name, Address and Phone Number as all of your local citations.

Google may have your location already in their system. If so click claim the page. If not create a new page.

Next you will need to prove that you have the right to manage the page. Google will give you the option to verify by phone or by mailing address. Google may not allow you to verify by phone in some cases.


image source blog.hubspot.com

Optimizing your Google Plus Page once your started.

Use your real business name. Do not include the city in your Business title if it is not in the name of your business!
Enter your real address and phone number. You will be using this address later to build citations.
Enter your website url in the specified location
Enter a description of your business here. Do not keyword stuff your description!
Choose a category that best matches your business
List areas that you serve or if customers have to come to you
Be sure to use all photos and videos (tip: you can geo locate your photos through picasa and your videos through youtube)
Fill in as much information as possible

Local Citations

Local Citations are probably the most important off page seo efforts you can have other than setting up your Google Places page correctly.
The key to setting up your Local Directory Listings is to have the same Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) across all listings. The category you place your listing in should be as close as possible across all listings.

GetListed can check to see if your site is already listed on the major Local Directory listings. There are some companies that will do this for your for a fee. Here is a list of other directory listings you can do yourself.

local.yahoo.com

smallbusiness.yahoo.com