Building Local Visibility

Building local visibility can help in a number of ways. In general, visibility benefits companies by helping them become "findable." This means that people who are interested in your product or service are able to connect with you.

Local visibility is a subset of that, which narrows search results by local results. This means that if I search for "Mexican restaurant," it will show me results nearby (in Boulder, Colorado), rather than somewhere else in the country.

These local options allow businesses to compete on a local level and in smaller service areas, rather than competing against every company nationwide. However, many companies fail to use these (free) services, which cause them to lose potential business.

In this post, we’ll look at two strategies that are

• Effective

• Easy

• Free

Or in other words, there is no reason you shouldn’t take an hour or so and make sure you have done this for your business. The benefits may be minimal, or they may be tremendous, but it will be worth your time.

However, if you run into trouble, or are interested in a more comprehensive solution, our search visibility consultants are can help you get started, help you implement your strategy, or help design a comprehensive visibility solution. Feel free to contact us, and we can tailor a solution to fit your needs and budget.

Strategy 1: Map Ranking

If you used a search engine, specifically Google®, you may have noticed that in the search results it produced a local map of companies that fit your keywords.

How does Google or any other search engine determine which businesses are in here?

Google bases this list off of many factors, including relevancy to the search terms, and proximity to your location. This means that the results may change for each user.

A more important question is "how does Google know about my business?" Most likely, it has read your website. However, there is also a way to tell Google, and every other search engine, exactly what your business offers.

You can do this on every search engine at their local business center. This is a free service, and it lets you create your own business listing on the search engine.

This can include your hours of operation, products you provide (and prices), specials, menus, promotions, parking, service areas, and any other information about your company. These listings help tell the search engines, and your future customers, what you offer. It does not guarantee that you will rank on the map instantly, but it can definitely help.

Besides the search engine results page, map ranking can help in many other ways. First, mobile technologies enable users to search their surroundings for the services they need. For example, on Android phones (such as the Droid, Nexus 1, Evo, etc), Google Maps is the most used app. This means that more often than anything else, people are using maps to find businesses around them.

For restaurants, and consumer goods in general, this can be extremely valuable to bringing people into the store, especially because the people that find you on maps, already know exactly what they want.

Here is a list of some of the major search engine sites’ local business centers. Once again, registration is free, but you may need to create an email account for each service.

Google Local Business Center

Bing Local Business Center

Yahoo! Local Listing Center

Google also gives some good tips on creating your listing, which will be helpful on all your listings.

Strategy 2: Online Ratings, Reviews and Business Listings

Online ratings can be tricky, especially because we want to look as best as possible for potential clients. These ratings are also often aggregated by search engines (especially Yahoo! and Google) and are displayed alongside search results.

There are some things that you can do to make reviews less painful. First, you can take control. In the same way that you made an official listing for Google, you can make a free listing on most of the popular rating services.

Creating a listing allows you to at least present an official business front for your business, control your profile, and engage users. Of course, you cannot, and should not, try to seed rankings or provide false reviews. But an official listing does allow you the ability to monitor reviews, and respond to the reviewer – either directly or publically. Yelp, one of the review sites, has a really good article on responding to positive and negative reviews.

Another benefit to building official listings on rating sites is that people often use them to find local businesses. Similar to a search engine, people can find important information about a location – such as hours of operation, whether or not they take credit cards, if they offer patio dining, and much more. Providing this information can inform people about the things you offer, and the things that make you unique from your competition.

Building official listings can be something that you do and then never touch again (unless you need to make small updates or changes). Or you can become very involved and use it as a method to engage the community. It is up to you, and how much time you have available, but even just creating a listing can have a very large impact.

Some of the more popular rating services are listed here, with a link to get you started.

Steps for creating a business profile:

1. Visit the sites listed below.

2. Use the search feature on the site to try to find your business.

3. If you cannot find your business, you will be presented with a message that says your business was not found, and an option to create your business.

4. If your business was found, double check to make sure it is you, and then there should be a link at the bottom of the listing that says "claim your business" or "own this business?"

5. At some point during this process you will be prompted to create an account. As of this writing, all accounts have a free option, but you may be prompted to upgrade to an optional paid version which gives additional features. Upgrading is your descision, but for many businesses you can accomplish your goals with only the free options.

6. Most review sites will call to verify your listing and to ensure that you actually own the business. This protects against fraudulent claims of ownership.

So, here is a list of popular review sites that allow you to create, own and modify your business listing for free:

CitySearch: Follow the steps above, and search for your business first. However, the direct link for creating a business is:

http://national.citysearch.com/profile/add_business .

Yelp: Most likely it will already have your business already listed. If not it will allow you to add it. Yelp allows you to also track how many people visit your business profile, and respond to reviews.

TripAdvisor: Unfortunately only some types of business listings are free. For example, restaurants can get a free business listing, but hotels have to pay. Otherwise it is great touristy-type businesses such as hotels, attractions, events, restaurants and other tourist type organizations. Follow the steps above and try to find your business first. If it does not exist, you may have to email them to include your business. Some rumors indicate that they may eventually offer free listings for everyone, so it may be worth checking back if you don’t want to pay the annual listing fee.

Local.Yahoo.Com: Very easy to add a new business. This is the same local listing as mentioned above, so if you created it there, you don’t need to repeat the process.

Google Maps: People can review business directly on Google Maps if they are logged into their Google account.

Insider Pages: An easy sign up process, this is great for creating a free and visible business listing. This one does try to upsell you a little bit more than some others, but you can skip through it pretty quickly.

Zagat: While Zagat is a premier rating service for restaurants, other businesses (specfically nightlife and hotels, but also malls, golf, and some shopping establishments) can update their profile for free! Do this by searching for your business and clicking the upload link.

Also, there are many industry specific rating and listing sites. I have listed a few here, but I know there are more out there. If you have one that you would like us to include, please let us know in the comments below.