Search Engine Optimisation or SEO has become big business over the last 10 years. Coming high up in the search engine results pages can provide your business with an enormous about of traffic. With over 70% of all traffic coming originating from a search and 73% of all searches are related to local content in one way or another, this is hardly surprising! Consumers actively searching for products or services provided by local businesses totals an astounding 1.8 billion every month! With a lot of local businesses wanting to rank top for their key phrases in their local area, good local SEO is important. Now local SEO isn’t exactly the same as your everyday SEO, different practises and techniques apply in order to achieve a successful local rank. Google has recently released updated the way in which local SEO works by merging organic listings with Google Places results. You may have already seen a small image and location information attached underneath the normal organic result on search result pages. This means that ranking well for local search terms means you need to have optimised a health balance between organic and Google places. Working on both is essential to beating any competitors that may currently sit above you. Organic SEO in brief First stop is to get all the basics of SEO covered : - [*]Optimise your keywords on the appropriate web page. [*]Make sure your link structure allows easy navigation of your pages [*]Give all anchor tags a title and appropriate anchor text [*]Give all images alt tags with appropriate alternative text [*]Make sure your website is being indexed in the major search engines [*]Acquire relevant back links with appropriate anchor text [*]Regularly update you web pages with fresh content This should be done for any website in which you are performing SEO upon. You can go into great detail in each subject I have listed above, but I will keep it short in this article. Google Places Optimisation Google Places, formally known as Google Local Business Center is mostly separate from Google’s search algorithm, infact is has its own algorithm to work out the most relevant local result for a given search term. So what do you do to get your places listing at the top? The following list is compiled from opinions of industry experts and facts given by Google. Make sure you claim your business listing The business address in city of search Complete the entire listing (Photos, Videos, Categories) Give categories relevant keywords Use local phone numbers when possible Do not put location information in business title Only put keywords in business title if part of business name Make sure the link to a website goes to a relevant landing page, this should include contact details matching that on the places listing. Place product / service keywords within description Reviews on Places listing and 3rd party websites Ratings (Stars) Citations, structured and unstructured, listing of company address, telephone and title as displayed on the Places listing In my opinion having an address based in the targeted area and a large quantity of citations are the most important factors. With normal organic SERP’s its always quality over quantity, but with citations I believe it’s the opposite. Your business address needs to be listed everywhere and anywhere, as long as it is relevant to your business. In conclusion, Optmising for local SEO on Google is all about the mix between organic practises and Google Places optimisation. Google places has a big influence over organic results since the merge. Look out in the future for the introduction of local social factors, there has been rumors of Facebook getting involved in local search. My best guess would say that it is to do with recommendation to friends and popularity of local businesses via social networking platforms. Please hit me with any questions you may have on this subject, I'll be happy to answer them
@Oceanus: No Problem, I will be adding more info to this thread shortly going into more detail about how to do individual steps!