Local SEO Ranking Factors

Ranking Your Website in Local Search Results

How to rank a website for Local Keywords? What are the factors you need to take care of when doing SEO for your local business? SEO is tough and Local SEO is really tough. Take a look at this post, as I am going to share some tricks and technique how you can rank your website well for local keywords. These techniques are 100% white hat, so do not worry about getting your website slapped after using these methods.

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Local SEO Ranking Factors:

1. Local Business: No matter what your website is about and what your business is, you must get a Google business place to stand out your website for local keywords. You should verify your office address to Google and to be at the top.*
This is simple but takes 2-4 weeks as you will be receiving a real postcard from Google.

• Go to http://www.google.com/local/add/
• Now do a phone number search, to make sure your business is not already listed in Google places.
• Now fill as much details as you can.
• Click on verify, after you receive the confirmation code. Put it in there and your listing is ready.

Listing your business in Google places really help in SERP’s ranking and it really plays an important role when visitor see your business name with their local Google maps and phone number and all the details.

2. Citations: This is the best way to tell search engines that, you are the same business all over the internet which is providing “xyz” services in “abc” city.
You can do this by creating listings in Yellow pages site of your city and other business directories.
All the citations should be having the same name, phone number and address, to make sure search engines know this is you.

To find these business directories, you can Google “yellow pages” “local business” “business directories” “business listings” etc.

3. Authorship: This is the proven method of increasing your CTR (Click through rate). See the image below.

When you have something like your Photo, your name and Google+ Circle in search results, people will obviously click on your site.

To become a verified author, you need to do 2 things:

• Create a link from your website to your Google+ profile page with an attribute rel=author Eg: https://plus.google.com/u/0/108674741967796575977?rel=author
• Now go to your Google+ profile, click on ‘About’ tab and in the ‘Contributor to’ section add your website address. Like the Image below:

So these are the a few methods you can use to rank your website in local search results, but make sure these will only help you increase your visibility only if other SEO conditions are fulfilled like the Backlinks, On-page optimization and lots more.

Keep in touch for more on SEO, Web design stuff. If you have suggestions or question, post below in the comment section I would love to answer you.

- Diwakar Saxena