
A quick post tonight for the small business out there interested in how they can rank well for local searches…
There has been alot of data out lately (and I have confirmed this in my personal tests) that seems to show a huge shift in ranking factors for local search queries. My personal opinion is that this has been a gradual change over the last year.
What is the primary shift??? Citations
What is a citation in the context of Local SEO? A citation is an occurrence of a business address on a website… typically an IYP site (Internet Yellow Page websites). There is alot of evidence to show that these occurrences can improve ranking significantly in the local search results area on search engines like Google. Here is some more evidence…
Here are a few places where you can submit your business address to help improve your local search engine ranking:
Hope this helps. Local SEO is really hot right now, and it’s never been easier to get really good ranking in local search.
There are alot of these types of tips online, but I’ve found that many of them are outdated or just plain don’t work. These 3 steps are proven tactics that I’ve used to help small businesses rank better for local search terms.
Before you dive in, remember that a site that targets local customers can be a huge advantage. When you use your physical address freely on your website, it allows the search engines to help you place more emphasis on the searchers in your local area.
If you have multiple addresses, I highly recommend that you create a unique page for each of those addresses, and make it a quality landing page for customers coming directly to that page. You also want to make sure you reference these specific pages when submitting a local business listing to search engines.
As always, let me know if you have any questions, and feel free to share and link to this post!
If you aren’t familiar with this, click here first. It does require a bit of mucking around in the html, but you can simply use the code below as a guideline. Just copy and paste it into your site and replace the location details. This will basically allow the search engines to parse your address when they crawl the page you place it on and correspond it with your local listing (assuming you have one). If you don’t, hang your head in shame, and then follow this link to get added.
<div class="vcard">
<a class="fn org url" href="http://www.commerce.net/">CommerceNet</a>
<div class="adr">
<span class="type">Work</span>:
<div class="street-address">169 University Avenue</div>
<span class="locality">Palo Alto</span>,
<abbr class="region" title="California">CA</abbr>
<span class="postal-code">94301</span>
<div class="country-name">USA</div>
</div>
<div class="tel">
<span class="type">Work</span> +1-650-289-4040
</div>
<div class="tel">
<span class="type">Fax</span> +1-650-289-4041
</div>
<div>Email:
<span class="email">info@commerce.net</span>
</div>
</div>
This is another piece of code that you can simply copy and paste and fill in the proper information. It needs to be placed in the head section of the code for the page you want it on (normally the home page if your business only has one address). I usually place my right below the title tag. If you need help knowing what to place in the ICBM section, try this link.
<meta name=“country” content=“USA, United States, United States Of America, America”> <meta name=“ICBM” content=“39.7114, -104.8192″> <meta name=“geography” content=“14501 E Alameda Ave Ste 1, Aurora, CO, 80012″> <meta name=“DC.title” content=“Aurora Counseling Center”> <meta name=“zipcode” content=“80012″> <meta name=“description” content=“Aurora Counseling Center at 14501 E Alameda Ave Ste 1, Aurora, CO 80012″> <meta name=“state” content=“CO”> <meta name=“keywords” content=“Aurora Counseling Center, reviews, ratings, recommendations, best, worst, map, directions, hours, Community & Social Services, Counseling, denver, Directory & Services, social services”> <meta name=“city” content=“Aurora”><meta name=“postalcode” content=“80012″> <meta name=“address” content=“14501 E Alameda Ave Ste 1, Aurora, CO, 80012″>
IYP stands for Internet Yellow Pages. These sites are great to submit to when you want to build up some basic links, but more importantly, they will help solidify a strong listing on the sites that really matter like Google and Yahoo Local. When Google Bot sees a large recurrence of the same address and lots of references to the web page associated with that physical address, it can really help to boost local rankings. If you’ve never submitted your business listing to an IYP before, start with Google & Yahoo, then move on to InfoUSA (they help populate over 25 websites). TIP: keep all of your listings very consistent, and if you have more than one address, make sure to link to the specific page on your website that references that address.
In this video, I talk about a couple of simple ways you can find out how popular a keyword phrase is, and the general level of competition. This is done through Google’s keyword research tool, and a simple check of the titles in the Google results for that query. By the way, here are a couple of sample search queries that may help you along the way:
Hope you enjoy the video!
Practical SEO Competitive Research from Justin Smith on Vimeo.
Hot off the press… Hitwise just published updated statistics on long tail queries and search engine market share. Have a look!

*** Based on the percentage changes above, we can see that long tail searches are dominating on the search engines. People are starting to realize that they can get better results on more descriptive phrases. If there was ever a case to create more descriptive content, this is it!!!

*** This table shows Google’s continuing dominance. The most surprising stat here is the 15% decline in Yahoo’s market share! That is a huge drop in just a year. The search engine wars are officially over and a clear winner has emerged.
What does this mean for you and your business?? Well if you read this blog regularly, it doesn’t mean much. You are prepared, because I’ve always been a major proponent of quality conent and lots of it. Keep writing those descriptive articles, keep creating valuable content, and pay close attention to this blog… there are some changes afoot with the Google algorithm, and you’ll want to be paying close attention… STAY TUNED!!
I had the great pleasure of being able to interview Lorelle VanFossen yesterday afternoon. For those of you that are not aware of her work, you can head on over to Lorelle on WordPress. She is considered to be one of the top blogging and WordPress experts in the world and can be regularly seen keynoting at large blogger conferences such as WordCamp, and SOBcon.
The podcast is quite long for an interview, so I won’t be able to transcribe the entire thing, but I will hit a few of the key points here.
“You can’t get anywhere without a plan; my tip is multi-fold…”
This is just a sample of some of the great tips Lorelle has to offer from her book: Blogging Tips - What bloggers won’t tel you about blogging. Make sure to check it out!
Thank you again Lorelle for your time. I am genuinely thankful for the time you gave for the interview.
Make sure to check out Lorelle on these sites as well:
** Woopra
** Blog Herald
More reasons to rely on organic SEO…
Probably the most common request I get in the SEO field is: “Can you check my website for errors and problems?”. People often seem to be paranoid that there may be some feature of their websites causing the ranking to suffer, or that some secret piece of code is hurting their ranking ability. Usually this paranoia is unfounded, and they simply need better content, more links, etc.
But in some cases, I’ve found that there can be problems with sites that hurt the ranking. Usually these have to do with the ability of a search spider to crawl a site. I call this “Search Engine Friendliness”.
The most common errors that lead to search engine ranking problems are:
So how do you know if you have any of the above problems, and how do you check for common errors? Try these 5 steps:
I hope these 5 steps are useful. You may not need them very often, but when you do you’ll wish you would have bookmarked this post… ![]()