Local Search Help

by Ted Burkholder

Posted: 12 years ago 10 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

Hey guys.... I was wondering if anybody could give me a little advice about local search results? I live in pittsburgh and was wondering if there was a way to have my site show up locally if somebody else from my area did a search for something in my niche. For example, I have a client I did some design work for who owns a towing and auto body business here in pittsburgh. So if somebody from this area did a search for towing, he would be at the top of the search results. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Maybe. suggest a WSO or something? I'm not exactly new at SEO, just to the local search aspect.

#local #search

Tadresources

12 years ago

The key is to have your site and its backlinks optimized to relate to your area. IE if you were selling toasters your keywords should be "Pittsburgh Toaster Emporium". Obviously this is just a silly example, but you know what I mean.

Thanks
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Ted Burkholder

12 years ago

Originally Posted by Tadresources

If you were building backlinks to 'pittsburgh toasters' doesn't that mean that the person doing the search would actually have to search for 'pittsburgh toasters'? I am looking for is for someone to do a search for 'toasters' but have local results show first. I thought that this was possible, no?

Thanks
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Eric Seiler 12 years ago

Signing up for local directories, Google places, etc. can help.
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Blaine Smitley 12 years ago

What works for me is to follow this rule...

Each page - title tag - description - and keyword phrase, should have the area name in it. Then have it again in the H1, and H2 tags as well. Have a page for each area the company does business in.

Here in louisville we have several smaller outlying cities so I make a page or two for each one of them. The traffic from them is great.

You will also want to have the client go claim any free local ads from google, yahoo, bing, and the list goes on and on. You'll get more business from them than anything if you set them up right and he gets rated well by his customers.

Then there are individual product pages.. I have a small local painters website that has 70 pages to it now. About 65 of them are area, product and service pages. The one that gets the most traffic is a page named "ceiling drywall repair Louisville". It's seo'd to catch that phrase, and it gets a lot of hits that convert to callers.

Local hits to a website are a piece of cake if done right. It's not nearly as hard as what the warriors here do. Ranking world wide or nationally isn't for the faint of heart and is just much, much tougher.
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Blaine Smitley

12 years ago

Here's a list of local directory's that will get you started.
They're all free, you will want to make a diary of usernames and passwords for each site.

Make sure to keep the NAME of the business, The ADDRESS of the business, and PHONE NUMBER of the business all the same across all of the ads. It's very important.

Yahoo! Local Features — Overview
MerchantCircle.com | Find new customers
Advertise on Local.com Yellow Pages - Self Serve
Get Your Free Business Listing | SuperMedia.com Advertising
Citysearch City Guides by State
Topix: Your town. Your news. Your take.
Insider Pages - Restaurant Reviews, Beauty Salons, Dentists, Preschools, Spas and more.
Bing Bing Business Portal (BETA)
Matchpoint
Yellow Pages - YellowBot
Create a Business Account KUDZU
Welcome to Best of the Web
SJUDYS BOOK Social Search® To Get The Trusted Scoop On Local Places
Localeze Business Listing - Sign In
nSphere - Get A Free Listing AND Business Profile
50 High Page Rank (PR) Free Web Directories | Webmaster Blog - Wordpress | SEO | Blogging | Design | Development
Login | Yelp for Business Owners

There are a lot more but I start with these... Google local isnt in there so you will need to go there and get one. It's the most important of all.

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Eric Seiler

12 years ago

Originally Posted by kid carson

Here's a list of local directory's that will get you started.
They're all free, you will want to make a diary of usernames and passwords for each site.

Make sure to keep the NAME of the business, The ADDRESS of the business, and PHONE NUMBER of the business all the same across all of the ads. It's very important.

Yahoo! Local Features -- Overview
MerchantCircle.com | Find new customers
Advertise on Local.com Yellow Pages - Self Serve
YP.com Listing Management Center: Create Your Listing
Get Your Free Business Listing | SuperMedia.com Advertising
Citysearch City Guides by State
Topix: Your town. Your news. Your take.
Insider Pages - Restaurant Reviews, Beauty Salons, Dentists, Preschools, Spas and more.
Bing Bing Business Portal (BETA)
Matchpoint
Yellow Pages - YellowBot
STEP 1
Create a Business Account KUDZU
Welcome to Best of the Web
SJUDYS BOOK Social Search® To Get The Trusted Scoop On Local Places
Localeze Business Listing - Sign In
nSphere - Get A Free Listing AND Business Profile
50 High Page Rank (PR) Free Web Directories | Webmaster Blog - Wordpress | SEO | Blogging | Design | Development
Login | Yelp for Business Owners

Good list. I might add, if you are going to be going through this process yourself you might want buy a password tool such as Roboform.

This is also the kind of task that is easily outsourced. You just have to look for someone trustworthy.

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Ted Burkholder

12 years ago

If there is someone that could simplify this for me I would really appreciate it. So these suggestions would allow a user in the Pittsburgh area who simply did a search for "Towing" to see my clients business at the top of results since it is local? Please excuse me for not fully understanding what you guys are saying.

Thanks
1 reply

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Eric Seiler

12 years ago

Originally Posted by sixpoundshank

No, there is no guarantee that signing up for all of these will rank you at the top, even locally, but it will likely help in ranking the website higher for local searches if you were to sign up for these sites.

The only way to guarantee local results quickly is to set up a localized Adwords campaign. That has nothing to do with your organic ranking however. Given the nature of the business "towing" that is probably the first place I'd start however. If someone is looking for a local towing company, it is likely that they don't care where or not your link is in the organic or paid section of Google's SERP.

Fiverr is also a good place to look for people who will sign you up in these local directories. It beats spending most of the day doing it yourself.

Thanks
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Ted Burkholder

12 years ago

Originally Posted by Eric Seiler

Well, I was just using the towing business as an example. I wasn't actually trying to any further work for him at this point. One of the reasons I ask is I know that on certain websites you would either get popups or banner ads based on where you live. So I just wanted to be able to implement a strategy like this. So if a local pittsburgh user would be searching for say..."make money blogging" or "work from home" I would show up first. I know that when I first got involved in MLM a few years ago there was a guy that was in "XYZ Company". He told me that he had a way that when anyone from his area did a google search for that company name he would show up first in results because he was local. Keep in mind the person didn't have to search for "Pittsburgh XYZ Company" just do a search for the company and he was there on top.

If I were able to do something like this, I could create a fantastic local little division and a nice income.

Thanks

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Ted Burkholder 12 years ago

Wasn't there a WSO that came out recently that went over this strategy?
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