Online Marketing Tips Video: Local Search Optmization for Small Businesses

By Li Evans

This week's tips in online marketing video is all about Local Search for Small Businesses and how they can use local search even if they don't have a website.  Also covered is how to make sure your social media profiles on rating and review sites is correct, and adding location pages to your website.

And there's no music on this week's edition, we had a glitch in our editing and had to redo this edition, so music and credits were left off, but as the others were this one is sponsored by KeyRelevance and it's a Benday Production

Full transcript after the jump....

Local Search for Small Businesses Video Transcript

Hi and welcome back to Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing.  Today is Tuesday July 29, 2008 and I'm Li Evans of Search Marketing Gurus and KeyRelevance.

Today we're going to talk about local search and some tips in how you can optimize your site and take advantage for your business of local search withing the search engines and different social media sites.

List Your Business in Google Local, Yahoo Local, and Microsoft Local

What you want to take a look at first is adding your business listing to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.  Each of these services in the search engines have an actual local search component which you can add the important information about your business even without having a web page.  You can make sure your listing is in Google, Yahoo and MSN and you can actually add pictures and video to these  different listings within Google.  So you want to make sure you are adding your address, your hours you are open, what kind of payments you take and different key important things that are crucial to what your business is about.  This will help your business actually rank within the local listing that appear if someone types in different things like "Philadelphia Restaurant" or they might type in "Philadelphia Carpenter". 

If you don't have a website, you can actually appear in the local listings with a map that shows up with Google, Yahoo and MSN when they actually list these types of things.  As I said before you can add video and you can actually pictures to your Google listing.  With Google you can either had a listing from Google Video or from YouTube Video. You can also upload pictures of the actual business, whether its the front of your business or the sign of your business, you can add these to Google's local search listing where your account would be.

Make Sure Your Social Media Profiles Reflect Current Business Information

You want to also take look at taking your social media profile in Yelp, or whether its in Trip Advisor or any of these other sort of social media sites that focus around ratings and reviews that are very local.  Yelp is a really good example of that.  You can actually make sure you have your business address is right, your opening hours, your closing hours, your own photos.  Right now you can't add videos, but probably, again, that might be coming.  You can make sure you have your URL if you do have a website you can make sure that is also intact in these social media profiles because its another place that can actually rank for your business name or for the types of keywords you are trying to optimize around with the location that you are at.

Add a Location Page or Location Pages to Your Website

The last thing you want to look at in doing local search, you want to make sure if you have a website you have a locations page, or just a location page.  If you have many locations, you want to make sure you have a page for each one of these locations that list the address, the phone number and other key important information about where this location is.  You can add a map from Google or from Yahoo and this will help Google and Yahoo kind of relate where you are location wise, to what people are looking for.

Those are your tips in Local Search for Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing.  As always you can find a transcription of this video at SearchMarketingGurus.com I'm Li Evans of KeyRelevance and Search Marketing Gurus, stop back next week for more tips in online marketing.

Comments

[David Rosemill]

Good Post,
There is also a good opportunity right now to take advantage of Youtube locals geo-tagging feature. It is a good way for businesses to differentiate themselves.

[Local Search Marketing]

Nice post

[jeff paul]

well i must say the marketing tips are really informative , the video was a good piece of work and i had fun reading this blog.