Thursday, July 30, 2009

Can You Manipulate The Results Of Google Local?

By Andrew Jacobsen

Whether you are an small business owner or search engine optimization specialist Google local is an important factor in getting targeted visitors to a website. Competitive markets like "landscaping" can have many pages of results. It is vitally important to be near the top.

Most of the time the local results take up the entire first half of the page requiring the searcher to scroll to see the first organic ranking. As a search engine optimization specialist I know that the majority of the clicks are going to these local listings.

Can you make a business rise in the Google local rankings? That seems to be the real question. The answer to that question is: probably with the right technique.

With traditional SEO we are left guessing at what Google's algorithm is looking for to improve rankings, so we test different methods and gauge their success. Recently a patent was given to Google for local search as well, so we must use this method of testing as well. Some of this testing has showed positive results and I will share some of them with you below.

The most important factor is making sure all of your information on the major data providers is accurate and as identical as possible. The goal is to make it easy for Google to verify and understand exactly what your business is about. This will make you more relevant to people searching for your services and that is exactly what Google likes. The three data providers that are crucial to be listed in are: Localeze, InfoUsa and Acxiom.

The next step is to put the same information into as many of the local directories as possible. Some of these include Yelp, Yellowpages.com, City Voter and many more. Again these links to your site tell Google that you are locally relevant.

Finally you should have some positive user ratings on the Google local listings. These are less important than the first two suggestions, but has show some benefits in some cases. It is definitely Worth having some stars in your favor.

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