You might already know about the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO); we talk about it at Good & Gold a lot. Optimizing your website by ridding it of the technical issues that suppress your search appearance, lower your click-through rates, and hide your business from potential customers in the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is very important—but it’s only part of the battle.
If you have a physical location or serve a specific geographical market, there’s another crucial piece to the search marketing puzzle: Local SEO.
When we talk about “Local SEO,” we are referring to the process of ensuring that your business appears in all sorts of local searches. Part of this is ensuring that your Google My Business listing is correct; another is ensuring that your location data is appropriately tagged on your website. Here's an example of a Google Business listing for our client, Reverend's BBQ, which appears in the right-hand column of Google's search results page:
But if you’re like us, you don’t always conduct your local searches in Google or Bing. You probably search for a place to eat through Yelp; you might use SuperPages to find an architect, or CitySearch to find a local dentist. For this reason, it's important that your location information, your hours, your phone number, and your website be consistent and accurate across multiple platforms.
Additionally, local listings feed back into the major search engines, as Google, Bing, and Yahoo put a lot of trust in these local directory services. So ultimately, maintaining accurate listings on platforms like FourSquare, YP, and Localeze will help you boost your rankings in the major search engines as well. In other words, diligence with Local SEO will allow you to significantly multiply your online presence across platforms.
