All local business owners want to drive as much traffic to their site as possible. They want their businesses to rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs)–in the organic listings through search engine optimization and the local listings through local search optimization. If your business is not doing too well yet in the organic listings, you will want to immediately do all you can to rank in the local listings, as this will save you from not getting the desirable amount of traffic to your site.

But how do businesses rank higher in the local listings section of the SERPs? Let me share three easy ways to accomplish this.

1. Get Listed

Get listed on Google+ Local, Bing Places, and Yahoo! Local. These are the “search engine local business centers,” which are great tools to optimize your site. They are free and easy to use.

These sites allow you to place your business into categories (around 2 to 5). Make sure to do this step because search engines use this information when deciding which businesses to appear on the results pages for particular searches.

Go to the Get Listed resource site to familiarize yourself with local SEO practices and which sites are the top ranked ones to get your business listed on.

2. On-site Optimization

On your site, make sure to have your address on each page. Generally the footer of each page is best. If that’s not possible, then place the address at the very bottom of each page.

Also, if you place the location within the content of the page, do it naturally without being repetitious.

3. Local Directories

Submit your business to free local directories. This will increase your ranking in the local listings. A citation is a mention of your business’ name and address, and the more local directories you submit to, the better.

Austin Lund
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