BLOG

Tour

Sign-Up


« Economic Downturn Affects Bicycle Shops
MerchantOS Featured on InYourShirt.tv »

10 Steps To Get Ranked Locally In Search Engines

3 Comments »
Justin Laing on April 15th, 2009.
Posted in Guides & Advice.
yellow pages

Increasingly local businesses are searched for and found online. The days of the big yellow book next to everyone’s phone are near their end. If you want your business to be found by your customers you need to be listed in the local search results of Google (most importantly), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about here’s what you see when you search for “olympia bike shop” from a computer near Olympia, WA (where I live).
local_search_results_example

Because MerchantOS is getting into the business of hosting website’s for small retailers, I thought I should go over how to get your business to show up in that highly valuable position.

The 10 Steps To Ranking Locally

#1 Create / Claim Your Business Profile

Register your business with the search engines here:

#2 Setup Your Business Profile With Search In Mind

When you create your business listing within the search engines listed above make sure to fill out your details with care. Here are some important factors in your listing:

  • Use your products and services or business type in the title of your business listing. Say our bike shop is called “Justin’s Shop”. Our entry title should be “Justin’s Bike Shop” instead of just “Justin’s Shop”.
  • Consider putting your city and state within the title of your business listing. So for our bike shop we might put “Justin’s Bike Shop, Olympia WA”.
  • In the description of your business put your products and services, your business type, and your location (city and state). For our bike shop we would put “Bike/bicycle sales and service. We have road bikes, mountain bikes, cruisers and more. We can repair your flat, or give your bike a full tune-up. Conveniently located in Downtown Olympia, WA.”
  • Make sure you put your business in the proper category. If the category doesn’t exist create a new one if possible. This is very important; being in the incorrect category can make it very hard to rank for the search terms your customers are using.

#3 Get Listed Where Search Engines Can Verify Your Business

Make sure your business is listed in these data sources:

#4 List Your Address And Phone On Your Site

Make sure your local address and local phone number (not a national toll-free number) are listed on every page of your site.
If you use MerchantOS to host your website you can put this information in your footer (we will do this by default for you).

#5 A Good Contact / Directions Page

Create a Contact or Directions page that lists your location address, phone number, and directions including nearby landmarks to your store.

#6 Your Site’s Title Tag

The title of your website should include the term you want to be listed under and your city and state. For example for our bike shop in Olympia, WA, the title of our site would be “Justin’s Bike Shop, Olympia WA”.

#7 Call Out Your Products and Services In Your Content

Within your site you should use the phrases you want people to find you under on the search engines. Again with our bike shop the words “bike shop”, “bicycle shop”, “bike store”, and “bicycle store” would be used throughout our website text.

#8 Reference Your Location In Your Content

Include your city and state in the text of your site. Just like you want to include the terms you are targeting in your website text you also want to include your location. When talking about our Olympia, WA bike shop we might say something like “Our bike shop has been located in Olympia, Washington since 1981.” as well as other phrases that include our location throughout the site.

#9 Get Reviewed By Customers

Get your customers (real people) to review your business online. Ask them to review your business right inside of Google Local, Yahoo Local, and Live Local. Also ask them to review your business on sites like Yelp and MerchantCircle. Getting reviews inside of the search engines directly is more important than on third party sites like Yelp and MerchantCircle (in regards to ranking, though Yelp is becoming increasingly important especially for restaurants). Try to get at least 5 reviews on each site.

#10 Get Some Link Love

Search engines love links. The more links from other websites pointing to your website the better you will rank both in local search and general search. For local search you want links that contain your products and services, region, city and state. For our example bike shop we’d try to get links like these:

<a href="justinsolympiabikeshop.com">Justin's Olympia WA Bike Shop</a>
<a href="justinsolympiabikeshop.com">Olympia WA Bike Shop</a>
<a href="justinsolympiabikeshop.com">Justin's Bike Shop</a>
<a href="justinsolympiabikeshop.com">Bike Repairs and Sales</a>

and so on…
If you have a personal blog put a link from your blog to your store’s site. If your friends, family members, or business associates have websites or blogs ask them to put these links on their site. Be specific on how exactly you want the link when you ask. A couple links can really help your website rank better.

Local Search Resources

Have You Got Your Site Ranked?

Please leave a comment below to share your own tips and experience in getting your site ranked in the local search results for your area.

3 Comments to “10 Steps To Get Ranked Locally In Search Engines”

  1. Janet Ott
    April 27th, 2009 at 10:12 am

    Justin, what a useful article! Thanks for writing it and pointing it out during the Biznik meeting. Great to know you and MOS is there!

    jan

  2. Rachel Friedman
    May 6th, 2009 at 7:39 pm

    Jan Ott pointed me to this article. It is very well written, clear and useable by the average human. Great job.

  3. Karen Patrick
    August 10th, 2009 at 1:05 pm

    Good article… Just to add that Microsoft recently changed Live to “Bing”. It’s awesome advice to go claim your listing there and at Yahoo and Google.

    Also, I recently had a bump in rankings for a project by creating a youtube video and then tweeting about it on twitter. Amazed at the results! Apparently the more diverse your content and links, the better.

    cheers,

    Karen patrick.olympiaATgmail.com

Leave a Reply