How Do I Rank in Local Search? [Video FAQ Series]

Hi SEO.com followers,  My name is Ty Kilgore and today I’m going to be answering the question;  How do I Rank in Local Search or how do I rank in maps? Local SEO is that something that has really taken off in the last year to year in a half.  The search engines are putting more emphasis on the users to fill out the information than ever before. So I am going to be talking about 5 different things that you can do to help you to rank in Local SEO. 

1. First thing is that you want to make sure that if you want to show up for localized terms that you have a business address and phone number that is local. For instance if I wanted to show up for terms in Lawrenceville, Georgia I would need to make sure that my business was located in Lawrenceville, Georgia and that I also had a phone number that was local to the area. 
2. Next, you will want to build out citations.  You can build these citations on the many different popular citations sites out there. For example:

• Yelp
• CitySearch
• Yellow Book
• Insider Pages
• Super Pages

And the list goes on. Essentially what you want to do is make sure that you have local citations built out and that you have all the correct information for your business listed there. 

3. The third thing that you want to do is claim you local business on Google Places or Bing. An owner verified listing will rank higher than a non owner verified listing so it’s important that you claim that listing.  To verify the listing you will need to fill out the proper information on Google or Bing using information they will send you by phone or mail to confirm that you own that place.
4. The fourth bullet point that I’ll talk about is link building. You want to link build especially to the local listings on Google or Bing so that you have different things that are pointing back to that actual page.
5. The fifth thing that I’ll talk about is getting reviews. We live in an age where everybody wants to find out what everyone else thought about a product or service and nowhere is that more important than in local search.  If you have customers that are satisfied and enjoy your product encourage them to go online to fill out a review about their experience that will also help people that come to your site to learn more about what other people think. 

Hopefully these five things will help you in your local SEO marketing campaign.