The local search component of your online marketing strategy is critical. Not only do you need the traffic but you need to show large search engines (like Google) that you do indeed reside in local markets.

Here's a good article I found today with some tips on making sure your website is first ready to be listed locally:

Understanding the 98 Google Local Ranking Factors (searchenginewatch.com)

The Basics: Immediately Actionable Items

There are two different ways to look at the top local ranking factors: what matters and what you should work on. Several of the key factors to ranking well are out of the typical company's grasp, so a list of top 10 recommended action-ready factors were compiled in addition to an evaluation of the ranking factor list itself. Those actionable factors are:

1. Your physical address matching/listing the city where you're located.
2. Manually verifying your ownership of the company's Google Places page.
3. Having proper category associations for your page and citations.
4. Having a large number of "traditional structured citations" for your business (on sites like Internet yellow pages and local place aggregators).
5. Having your address listed on your company website, and make sure that address is crawlable.
6. Having a well-ranked (PR) company website.
7. Having high-quality inbound links to your company website.
8. Having your phone number listed on your company website, and making sure that phone number is crawlable.
9. Having an accurate local area code listed on your Google Places page.
10. Having your city and state listed in the page title for your Google Places landing page.

The items listed above can be treated as a checklist for establishing bare minimums for local search optimization.

These things seems pretty basic - like having your phone number on your website but it takes it a bit further. Is the phone number on every page? Not everyone will enter your website from the home page. Is it crawlable? That means, is it stuck in an image or is the phone number text?

Once you've made sure your website is ready for local listings, then you can work on getting local listings. Put up a Google Local page and then get on good search engine directories like MadisonClick to help show search engines that you do belong in the communities that you say you do. Doing this will help move your Google Places listings up because of the local support.

Google is doing its best to weed out bad results in their listings. This means you have to work even harder to prove that you're legit and that your web presence is solid. Just doing what everyone else is or the bare minimum might make you a candidate for removal or lower rankings.

-Tony

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