How to improve local ranking for small buisness?

igorbiscan

Hi,
I'm not experienced in seo, so forgive me for the very basic questions. I was just wondering what are the most effective methods for improving your search ranking for your website for a local company e.g. "motorcyle repair castlebar" or "motorcycle repair Mayo". Is it as simple as including these terms in your website and changing the page url's to text? Probably not that easy but just wanted a basic overview so we can make some adjustments to our website.Thanks in advance.

doroth

When it comes to local SEO it is very important to associate the targeted keywords with the location of your business. There are lots of introductory tutorials that can guide your through all necessary steps, but here are a few ideas to start with:
- register your business on Google+ Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Maps. Make sure you fill in as much of the required information, using the correct address of your business is crucial (street, city, state etc).
- include your business adress on all pages of your website (somewhere within the footer or sidebar might work best).
- try to contact local bloggers or local communities and convince them to review your products/services. Links from local pages are very powerful.
- once your business is listed on Google+ Places encourage your clients to rate your services and publish their reviews and thoughts on your Google+ Places page.

Hope this works.

igorbiscan

Thanks a mill Doroth. I will check these out.

doroth

No prob. If you have any further questions feel free to ask.

Apogee

doroth wrote: »

When it comes to local SEO it is very important to associate the targeted keywords with the location of your business. There are lots of introductory tutorials that can guide your through all necessary steps, but here are a few ideas to start with:
- register your business on Google+ Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Maps. Make sure you fill in as much of the required information, using the correct address of your business is crucial (street, city, state etc).

Can you outline how you can update an Irish business location on Bing Maps? I can only find directions on how to do this for US businesses.

Thanks!

irelandstats

Add the same NAP (name, address, phone) to local directories. Read throughly http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml#8

Add address information on your site in microdata from schema.org - http://www.microdatagenerator.com/local-business-schema