This trick uses two major components of organic SEO and local search, page title and a high-authority web presence. The results will vary dependent upon two main factors, the saturation of an industry and the competitiveness or size of the selected local area needed to be dominated.

The client used in this case study was doing business in Redlands, Ca., a small town in Southern California, east of Los Angeles. He moved up to another small town in Washington State called Mukilteo and now needs traffic from the new local area. We will first look at keyword popularity according to Google.

We begin by checking keywords in the free Google keyword tool by first typing in just one word, graphic. The client is a graphic artist and is looking for graphic design work. We start with one word to capture the most popular phrases and possibly find words or phrases we otherwise would not think of subjectively. The search terms: graphic design and graphic designer show some of the highest search popularity, so we will use these. Usually, in performing local search optimization, we can just add the name of the area, City or State to the main keyword phrase and will do so in this experiment.

After we have looked at keyword popularity, we will look at keyword competitiveness. We find that the search for graphic designer, mukilteo yields about 13,900 related sites, a very small population of competing sites indicating that it may be easy to dominate quickly.

Upon our benchmark search, our client does not show up at all in the search for our selected term, he is nowhere. He also does not have a MerchantCircle account. The first thing to do is to create a MerchantCircle account for him. You start by entering in the phone number of the business. If a business has been around for a few years, at the same location, using the same phone number, there is a good chance you already have a listing. If this is the case, you just need to claim it. If you dont have a listing, it is easy to set one up, and it is free.

When creating the listing the trick is to use the keyword phrase in lieu of the actual business name. You can also add the business name after the keyword phrase if there is room, it is important to keep it short, to 3 or 4 total words, as that is what will appear in the Google search results.

After adding the keyword phrase graphic design Mukilteo in addition to the business name in the new MerchantCircle account, we do another search and the results show the client as #2 in the Google search results, not bad for free.

It is important to note that MerchantCircle is a very large directory and will rise to the top of many searches because of that. It is also important to know that the more active you are with your MerchantCircle account, the more references to your listing you will have. In this case, with this client, I wrote a review of their work. The search results now will rank my client number 2 and number 3, number 3 being a reference to the review.

Mission accomplished. We went from being nowhere on the Google search results page to being number 2 and number 3 for a great search term within a day.

Incidentally, we placed number 1 and number 2 for the search term graphic design Mukilteo as well.

Try this for your local business and see if you get more traffic.