Best approach to ranking locally

[CallRingTalk]

Hello,

What are the best approaches to ranking locally. Ie a user in Dallas googles "mechanics" and local results return.

I understand Google+ local pages to be an important factor for the location based listings on maps.

What about about location specific pages on the site? Meaning if we have a page on the site talking about areas we serve in Dallas.

Other suggestions?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Call Ring Talk,

You have already received such awesome and helpful replies from the community, I will only add a bit here, some of which will be a summary of what others have written.

Local rankings depend on a ton of different factors. Where you have a physical location, your best bet is typically to pursue local rankings. If you are a Service Area Business (SAB) you must pursue organic rankings for your service cities. Per your original question, the development of city landing pages on your website is one of the best tactics for achieving organic rankings for cities where you serve but where you have no physical location. For more information on the topic of city landing pages, I have been told that this piece has been really helpful to a ton of people:

The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages

If the whole concept of Local SEO is new to you, I recommend that you read through all of the articles on GetListed.org, which is a MOZ website. Here is the link to the Learning Center:

https://getlisted.org/static/resources/

I further recommend that you follow Local Search Godfather, Mike Blumenthal, on a regular basis:

blumenthals.com/blog

And that you review the 2012 Local Search Ranking Factors report, though many things have changed in the past year. For many years running, this has been the premiere Local SEO industry survey:

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

One of the keys to successful Local SEO for any business is staying on top of the nearly-constant changes that happen in this area of marketing. Keep current and it will serve your business well!

[MoosaHemani]

Very Detailed and top the point answer by Tim!

Once you are done with the basics like Submission to Local Maps on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Business Listings on Yellow Pages and Data Aggregates...now it’s the time to do few Advance stuff!

1. Review Collection

You can start this by contacting your previous customers and request them to write a review about their experience while working with you! Initially it will be a pain but you only have to collect first few comments then reviews will bring more reviews...

2. Local Bloggers

It is a good idea to contact local bloggers and ask them to write a review about your product or service... if the bloggers are within your niche you can also request a column as a guest write on their blog.

Hope this helps!

[Marcus_Miller]

Great response from Tim.

To add a few further pointers:

1. There are some great lists of citations around so take a look  and get a list together

2. Total volume of citations matters and more is generally better (there are diminishing returns obviously) and you wan to make sure you have all of the important ones your competitors have. You can easily dig in and see you local competitors citations with some Google-Fu:

“Competitor biz name” AND “Competitor zip” -site:http://www.competitorssite.co.uk

This will show you a good batch of citations for your competitors (look at the top 3) and you can create a hit list.

3. Quality of citations - beyond getting the NAP 100% consistent and dialled in make sure you look at each one of the citations as a potential advertisement for your business. Build in your keywords and the service areas into the description as well to work on that co-occurance of keywords and improve the ability for your site to rank for these sub areas.

4. Reviews - 5 reviews will generally give you a bit of a boost (around 2 places). 10 reviews will give you a quality score in your listings again which can influence clicks and more importantly persuade customers to get in touch. Create a policy to drive positive reviews. Don't cheat, but ask clients you know who are happy if they would not mind reviewing. If you can figure out a way to get them to work in your keywords and location into the review as well then that will only help (again, don't cheat, don't build dodgy reviews, they will know and it will hurt the other good work - do this properly).

5. Make sure your on page optimisation is dialled in 100% - no excuses on that one

**6. **As with the citations make sure your Google+ listing is as good as it can be. Images, video, a great description. Don't just copy and paste the same description, write it out each time so it is a little different. Take your time. Do it properly.

7. Local links are also important so if there are local business organisations or sites then look to get links (and possibly citations) from those sources as well.

---

Local is deep and complex when competitive but in most cases, in the UK at least where we operate, it is easy to get up there with some simple strategies as listed above and small businesses can get found by local customers without having to do some of the bigger player strategies that are sometimes out of reach.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[RepLoc_Tim]

Yes, you are correct, Google+ Local pages are important, but this is only one small piece of what you need to do to rank locally.  To answer your question regarding location-specific pages on your site, the answer is "it depends."  For terms Google considers local in nature, like mechanics, you are not going to trick the search engine into moving you up the ranks just because you have a page on your site optimized for that area.

For example, if you had a Plano mechanics page, Grapevine, etc., but you don't have a physical location in those areas.  Your best bet is to rank for where your address is.  If your address is Dallas proper, then work on ranking in Dallas.  If there is a landmark area, such as the Galleria, and it is near your address, then having that on a page ("near the Galleria") can certainly help.  For areas that are not nearby, consider using Adwords and not waste time doing local SEO for them.  Once you understand this, proceed with these general steps.

Step 1:  Confirm the best data that should be used for the business (name, address and phone).  Typically there are multiple variations of each that have been propagated around the web depending on the source.  For business name, use the single best version that customers call the business.  For address, you will need to see what currently exists, however as a rule of thumb, use the USPS version: ex. Street - St (no period after), Avenue = Ave, East = E (no period). Finally, use the single best local phone number - not an 800 number and not a tracking number (per Google).

Step 2: Use this same NAP (name address phone) on your website and on all sites around the web including Google+ Local.  When you find listings with a different version, clean them up and make them match.

Step 3: On-site, put your NAP on every page in Schema format.  Embed a Google map on your site using the same address. If you have multiple locations, give each its own Contact page with your NAP, hours, maps emebd, etc.

Step 4: Complete your Google+ Local profile using your NAP and complete all fields.

Step 5: Use the same data and add, claim/ verify your business listing on other sites around the web.  Use GetListed.org as an initial guide.

That should give you a start.