Improving Your Local Ranking
If you are a local company, you should have already built your site with local search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. If you are a company that serves multiple locations, then you need to build a landing page for each city you serve to increase your local ranking, also called an organic ranking. It won’t be enough to merely list the cities you serve on your home page, and you won’t be able to simply replicate a landing page for city serve; you will need unique content for each page that does not duplicate your other pages. Google will penalize you for this, and you won’t rank at all in their search results.
There are a number of things you can do help increase your organic ranking. Here is a list of items you can try:
- Claim your Google+ Pages listing. Make sure that all your information is listed correctly, and add your service locations to the listing. You don’t need a page for each location, and if you try, Google will ban you from Google+ Pages. When you add information about your company, make sure that is relevant and interesting. Don’t add keyword after keyword for SEO purposes; Google will penalize you for this.
- Add your company to local citation sites like Touch Local or Yell. Each time Google can cross reference or match a local listing with another, it will improve your organic rating.
- Have your clients in the areas that you serve write a review for you. Then have them place it on Yelp or Angie’s List. Reviews are a great way to improve your organic ranking, and let potential customers know about the quality of your products and services.
It’s important that all your information be consistent when building your local presence. You will want to make sure that your address, phone number and company name are listed consistently across each of the local platforms you choose to establish your presence.
Google’s Venice update is one that has great potential for local businesses. By giving more importance to local businesses in the search results, Google has made rankings more relevant to the user. Companies who take advantage of the Google Venice update will have more control over their local search listings and exciting opportunities to expand their customer base.
