One of the best ways to drive traffic to your small business website is to make sure you rank well in local listings. Over half of Google searches are from logged in users and many more are searching from mobile phones. In both cases, location information is available and automatically factored into the search results. So, someone searching for a restaurant or auto mechanic, will automatically see localized results.

There are a number of ways you can improve your standing in local listings and get more of that business in your door. It takes a lot of effort but it's well worth the time, or better yet, worth the money if you get a local SEO professional to take care of it for you.

Claim Your Places Page

You business likely has a Google Places page whether you set one up or not. Google automatically finds information about your business from other listings and uses it to create a page. They do this so they have more complete listings and can offer better service to those searching. You can claim your page and take full control of it.

Making sure your information is as complete as possible and properly targeted to your ideal keywords is one of the first and biggest steps to improving your local search ranking.

Optimize Your Website

Your name, address and phone number should be prominent on your website. If you rely on walk in business, consider putting it in the header or sidebar of every page. This isn't only good for search, it's good customer service.

Of course, the optimization of your website affects how well this will work. If your existing website has poor SEO you need to fix that first.

Get Reviews

Lots of diverse and positive reviews can go a long way towards pushing you up the list of local businesses. Consider adding signage or putting something on your sales receipts that asks satisfied customers to leave a review.

This is only some of the many things you should do. Keep an eye out for a future blog post where we look at a few more tips to improve your local search standing.

Need help improving you local search listings or search engine optimization in general? Give Effex Agency a call at 321-872-8932 or contact us using the form below.

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