Getting your website listed in local search is not hard. It can be a very powerful tool to generate new leads for your company. Whether your business is plumming or you own a restaurant you can benefit from being to the top of the search engines. Here are several steps you can take to ensure that you end up near the top. Having your listing there is free traffic to months to come.

If possible, you will need to make several adjustments to your website. Anytime you make changes on your website to gain rankings in the search engines, this is known as search engine optimization. You need to make sure that you address and phone number are listed on your website in a way that google can read. This means having your phone number in a picture is simply not good enough. Ideally, your contact information and address will be on every page of you website in the footer. if you do not want to this, at least have it on a contact page. On you contact page, use the Hcard format. Google „hcard generator“ to get the proper format then paste the code to your website. If you cannot figure this out, at least put your address and phone number on the page in text format.

Next you will want to claim your listing in goole. You can do this by going to www.google.com/local/add. After you are done with google, make sure that you do the same thing for yahoo. You can help your chances of appearing at the top by making sure that you include the keywords you are going for in the business name. for example, if you are stan’s plumbing and you are in the orlando market, make sure that your listing says Orlando Plumbing somewhere in the business name. Add as many videos, pictures, and descriptions to the listing as possible. Then go do the same for yahoo at listings.local.yahoo.com with no www at the front.

One thing you can do to get a little bit of an edge in the search results is to tweak your address. The closer to the epicenter of the city that you are trying to rank for, the higher you will rank without more effort. I will leave it to you to decide whether this is a route you wish to go. I am simply explaining your options.

Your will also want to make sure that you use a local number and not a 1800 number. You can use a company call ringcentral to complete this task. Ringcentral will allow you to have a local number in every area code if this is what you are attempting to do.

The next step in the process is often the most crucial if you already have a developed market and were not able to rank initially. It will require you to go out and get backlinks to your website. There are numerous ways that you can do this. For local results, what you really want to local websites, or sites that Google considers locally oriented to link to you. These sites include

1. Chambers of commerce

2. any school websites (ask if they will give you a link for donation

3. Your church of temple

4. Local listing sites

5. local news blogs

Make sure that you request that you name and location be included in the link text. Link text/anchor text, which is usually blue, are the words that you click on to go to a another site.

Visit this link to download the google local business seo checklist free.