Local Business Rankings

Local SEO is much different than traditional a traditional SEO campaign. One of the biggest differences is the amount of up-front work that you’ll have to prepare before doing any real search engine optimization.

Below you’ll find some great information about how it’s important and how we rank clients businesses locally.

Let’s talk about NAP

You might be wondering why? Well with local business rankings consistently is key! This is due to the fact that NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) is the most important part of ranking locally. Essentially you want to have the same NAP across any citations (accurate information about your business) of your brand across the web, a good example could be your business listing on Yelp or YellowPages.

Though in Googles eyes the most important NAP of all is your brands Google My Business page. You don’t need to have one but speaking from experience shows it helps tremendously in ranking locally – at least in Google.

If you’re looking at getting a Google Business Page setup give us a call or e-mail and we’ll set you up.

Let’s also give you a quick example of a good NAP vs a bad NAP if your businesses citation was a follows: ACME Corporation, 1989 Mt Ave Yountville, CA 945499 United States.

Now take a look at the NAPs below compared to one above.

Good NAP

ACME Corporation

1989 Mt Ave

Yountville, CA 94599

(707) 226-1982

Bad NAP

ACME Corp.

1989 Mt Avenue

Yountville, California 94599

707-226-1982

What else helps ranking locally when creating citations?

So now that we know that having consistent a NAP is important for local business rankings what other information should be included on our citation listing? The list below is what we recommend for adding to any business listing you have.

• Ensure you use a long accurate description of your business
• Make sure you’ve added your local phone number to the listing
• Use as many photos as possible
• Pick the right categories for your business as this might affect what you’re being found for when users search
• Make sure you use the correct business days for your workplace as well as what hours you’re open and closed
• Ask customers to leave you reviews

Google 7 pack & Map Listings

One thing we want to mention about local business rankings is getting into the Google 7 pack as well as Google map listings. Both of these are powerful ways to get more attention on your brand.

Google 7 Pack

You’ve probably already seen the Google 7 Pack but just never knew what it was called. Anyways the 7 pack is a list of 7 local NAP businesses which are listed when you do a search on Google for name city name based search. Though there are times where you’ll see only 3 listings or even zero if Google can’t find enough relevant data to list the businesses. One of the easiest ways to get into the 7 or 3 pack is by calming a Google Business Page for your business.

Google Map Listings

If you’ve ever searched for something on Google Maps on your browser or smart phone the results you’ll see are known as map listings. They’re created by a business calming their Google Business Page. Unfortunately most small businesses don’t take advantage of this. If you’re interested in getting a listing setup give us a call or e-mail and we’ll help you out!

Now onto On-Page factors that affect ranking locally

There is a ton of factors that also go into what helps pages for your website rank locally. We aren’t going to go into all of them but we’ll list you the ones we deem most important for seeing results quickly.

• Using appropriate page titles that include your city and what the page is about
• Creating a meta description that includes not only your city and what page is about but making it inciting to the user so that they’ll click your site. Remember this is what they’ll see in the search results. Which means it also helps with CTR (click through rate) which is factored into ranking locally.
• Adding relevant information to your pages URL which will most likely include the service it provides. Also if you’re city name is already in your domain we recommend not placing it on inner pages as it is technically over optimizing your full url.
• Adding your city and what your page is about within H1-H6 tags.
• Using your image ALT attributes to hold your city name and relevant information about the image itself.
• Lastly making sure your content defines what your trying to rank for as well as including your city close to those keywords (words that you’re trying to rank for).

This alone won’t get you to the top but it’s a start

Hopefully you’ve understood everything we’ve said so far, if you don’t we’d be more than happy to help you with breaking into the local business rankings!

As you can see it’s about consistency with your listings though that’s not all of it. Depending on the industry that your business is in and how many competitors you have will reflect how hard it is for you to show up in these listings including for local search terms as well as Bing or Google Maps.

At some point when it comes to ranking locally it’s a numbers game. Whoever has the most citations as well as accurate citations will most likely be at the top of the list.

Let us help your local business rankings

We hope this information has been helpful to you, everything you’ve read so far is just part of what we do to help small to medium size businesses rank locally as well as get into the Google 7 Pack and Google Map Listings.

If you’re interested in getting you businesses visibility increased please fill out our analysis form and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours. Thank You!