First thing you want to do here is do some research.
1. Keyword Research - find the keywords you are interested in (obviously)
2. Do these keywords generate local results blended in with the main results?
3. If so - research the current ranking sites.
- How are they categorised
- what citations do they have?
- what do the citations look like?
- How is the actual site optimised for these terms?
- What is their organic ranking for these terms?
- What is their backlink profile look like?
A good way to dig into the competitors is to simply google their name, postcode and then remove their site from the results. This will get you started:
"Competitor" AND "Post Code" -site:http://www.competitor.co.uk
4. Think reviews - get reviews on your Google listing and also on any other relevant sites (looking at the local listings you should see external review sources mentioned if there are any worth considering).
--
Ultimately, you are going to want to do some local SEO - citations, local backlinks etc but you first want to make sure you have all the basics in place and the site and google maps listings are all correctly categorised. Then, get busy on those citations and get creative - anything can be a citation so think
- Press releases
- Q&A Sites
- Videos and Image descriptions
- Social profiles
- forum profiles & sigs
- Guest post bios
- article bios
Obviously, go after the directories where you can get listed. Look for any local directories or sites for citations and for industry specific directories.
Also, make sure you get the basics right. Get the name, address and postcode on every page of the site and make sure it is consistent with the Google listings. If you already have some citations, audit them and make sure everything is consistent there as well.
That should be enough to but in a nutshell dig in, research, find out what the successful people are doing and do more of it.
Hope that helps!
Marcus