Are you looking to dominate your local search results?

Local search can be easily overlooked. With a bit of patience as well as a few of the tips below, you should be able to capture more of that local traffic that you deserve. Here are the tips:

Get more local citations

Local citations are ‘mentions’ of your business name and address on other web pages. You’ll want to find out and get your name on as many local sites as well as other directories as much as possible. Remember that the more citations you have, the greater visibility you have to both your prospects and search engine ranking algorithms like Google. I’ll discuss how to get started on this below.

Get listed on local directories

You will have to find out what local directories best search your niche. You could even look at Foursquare check ins and sites like the Yellow Pages, Yelp and others.

If you are a restaurant, making sure you are listed and are getting reviews on restaurant review sites is crucial. Remember that social proofing is important. People love to hear about other people’s experience with your service or product.

Ask existing and new customers to give you a review. The chances of them giving you one if you don’t ask is slim to none, so it is always best to ask people to give you a good review. Think of sites like Amazon and the different app stores. Before you buy these days, you always read the reviews. Also think about staying at a hotel. These places are all ranked by a star system. Rankings and reviews will always be prominent in the prospects mind when they are researching you.

Get your location Google verified

This is easy and free to do. Just go to the Google places site. Sign in using Google account and follow the instructions. You will then get the option of Google calling, texting or sending you a post card with a verification code to verify that you are actually at the specified physical location. Do this for all your locations, even if clients don’t come to you. This is probably one of the biggest things you can do to gain extra search traffic through local search.

Optimize your location keywords

Make sure that if you are targeting a specific area, you have that area keyword within the copy of your web design. Make sure people know where you serve. If you do this right, Google will definitely pick this up.

Optimize your spelling

Websites like Google also look at the spelling of your words. Go with the spelling from the region that you are targeting. So for the UK, you would use British English. If you are targeting the US, then use American spelling.

Set up the right targeting options in Google AdWords and Google webmaster tools

When setting up an AdWords campaign, be sure to set location targeting to target the right locations. This is easily specified in the AdWords settings. For your website, you can also add your site to Google webmaster tools. Within Google webmaster tools, you can set the target location.

By implementing some of the above tactics, you will definitely cast a wider net for local search. Which tactics do you think you could use?