Improve your results in local searches

Many small businesses rely on ranking well in localised searches online and especially within Google Places. Here are some pointers to help you in the right direction:

• Get listed on Google Places – If you’ve not yet created a listing for your business then now is the time to do so. As Google collects information from various sources including Yellow Pages, you may find that your business is already listed but not yet been claimed. You can list your business in various categories, up to a maximum of five, so make sure you utilise this for maximum exposure. Fill in as much information as possible including photos and ensure that the address you provide is the same one that is on your website.

• Reviews on Google Places – encourage your satisfied customers to leave a review on Google Places, as this is a great way to boost your credibility. You will notice that the businesses with the top listings all have a great number of reviews left by happy customers.

• Optimising your website for local search – there’s a few things you can do to help optimise your site for local searches. Including the name of your city in the titles and headers of pages, where appropriate of course, will help give these pages a bit of a push. Providing your business address as structured data to search engines in the form of rich snippets will definitely help in the long run too.

• Local Directory listings – typing in name of city + directory into the search bar will return you directories targeted to that particular city. This can be a great way to gain you extra leverage in Google Maps.

Julie Cheung
SEO Programmer

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