Local SEO and What it Means to Small Business

Google is Changing

I’m sure by now you’ve noticed that Google looks and acts differently than it used to. The search engines have undergone a significant change in looking at your location and finding local businesses that fit the search term that you are looking for. You may search for “pizza place” and instead of finding any pizza place across the United States or the world, you’ll see a list of local pizza shops. Google is striving to do what every search engine ultimately wants: to give you the best results for your search term. By taking into account your location, Google is providing you with results that are more likely to apply to what you want. This has changed SEO drastically because now a local business has a fighting chance on some of those short keyword phrases it may not have been able to rank for before. These businesses aren’t necessarily just thrown on a list like it may seem. There are ways to rank within the local search terms as well, which will put your business at the top where everyone is looking. The main component to this local SEO is the citation, which is like a link but with a twist. By working towards gaining more and more citations, the local business owner will more likely bring in more traffic than before the local search movement began.

Citations???

Citations primarily consist of reviews of your business on the hundreds of review sites that exist across the Internet such as Yelp and InsiderPages. The fact that many citations are reviews of your business makes them harder to get and impossible to artificially grow without putting your businesses entire reputation on the line.

So… How Do You Gain Citations?

The solution is to get hundreds of positive reviews of your business. Concept is simple enough, but the process is not. So let’s start with some smaller, easier to achieve steps (i.e. baby steps).

Step one, find 1 review site to target. If you’re a restaurant Yelp makes a lot of sense. If you’re a lawyer, Avvo.com makes good sense. For other businesses it may be Kudzu, or InsiderPages. Once you’ve targeted one review site (remember, only one!) then you can move on.

Step two, urge your customers/patients/clients/etc. overtly and passively to leave a review of your business on the target review site. Some people are natural reviewers, others (like me) not so much so don’t be afraid to incentivize things – free giveaway, raffle, discount, or reward of some other kind.