The Complete Guide To Ranking Your Site In Local Search
ByMay 28, 2009 By Lisa Barone
What, are you looking for it here? Sorry, I didn’t write it. Local search expert David Mihm did with the newly updated edition of his Local Search Ranking Factors.
If you’re a small business owner trying to get a handle on local search
and what you need to get your site to rank, then I recommend you run,
don’t walk, to that document and give it a few reads over. And when
you’re done reading it, bookmark it. Because you’re going to want to
refer to it again later.
There’s a lot of theory given on blogs about what is or is not
important to local search ranking, but David’s document is compiled by
27 leading experts in the field, folks who do it every day. Together
they ranked nearly 50 different criteria with respect to their
influence in Yahoo and Google’s Universal results. The Universal local
results are the the 10-pack, 3-pack or onebox results that appear when
you perform a local query.
Some factors the SEOs looked at and rated the importance of were:
- Having complete local listings
- The proximately of your storefront to the searcher’s location
- Having product keywords in your business listing title
- Having the location keyword in the local business listing
- Associating video with your local business listing
- Associating photos with your listing
- Age of listing
- Having your full address on your contact page
…and more than 40 others. Each criteria was then evaluated on its
overall importance to ranking, as well as if that importance had
increased or decreased in the past last year.
Even if you’re not interested in running a large SEO campaign for
your Web site, there’s still a lot of knowledge to be gained from this
report. As a small business owner, there’s a lot to do. You want to
know which factors are most important so that you can focus on those.
Information like this gives you the insight you need to prioritize what
should be done immediately, what can wait a month, and what you’re
better off putting on the back burner.
One of the most interesting things I got from David’s guide was the growing importance of getting local citations
for your Web site. Citations are mentions of your business name and
address on other Web pages. That means in order to rank well in local
search you should be reaching out to the many local organizations
around you and letting them know your business exists. Get a mention
from your Chamber of Commerce, from local blogs, local directories and
resource sites, your school board association and anywhere else local
business information is found. These citations are relatively easy to
get (small businesses owners love helping one another out) and they’re
very powerful to the local search algorithms.
If you’re a small business owner, I really do recommended you give David’s updated Local Search Ranking Factors
a read to give yourself a leg up in local search. He created an
incredible resource to help SMB owners understand how Google and Yahoo
rank Web sites in their local search results. Don’t miss out.
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