The local listings in Google + Bing are becoming more competitive sector by sector and for some local businesses on the web, even tactics like competitive citation analysis and tools like Whitespark's awesome local citation finder aren't enough. Here, then, are five more unique and useful ways to boost the visibility of your local site on the web, earn more Places citations + reviews and potentially appear in even the most competitive local SERPs.
#1 - Discussion Search + Local Keywords
Google's "discussion search" feature is underutilized in general, but I was surprised when browsing the recommendations of other citation-focused threads to see that it hadn't ever been mentioned! Watch how easy it is:
The discussions not only lead you to sites where listings are often possible, but they also give a great opening to mention or promote your business (just make sure you do it authentically + transparently). It's also a tremendous source of competitive intelligence and goes deeper than the usual reviews in terms of researching what customers and potential customers want and why they might be choosing other businesses.
#2 - Image Results for Competitors' Business Names
Another great vertical for finding opportunities is the image search results. A variety of query types function here, but a few of the ones that I like include:
- Names of competitors' businesses
- Cityname + business type/category
- Products/services you offer + cityname
- Both of the above w/ neighborhood names (rather than citynames)
Here's an example of the potential value:
Note that hovering on an image shows its location, which can help you quickly determine if the source is one you've already got, or something new and worth investigation. Sources that show local images have a surprisingly good crossover with possible listing opportunities.
#3 - Events Calendars, Sponsorships + Donations
Google Places' list of sources (and Bing Maps' too) are pulling from more and more obscure pages and sites that have little to do with simply listing local businesses. It seems as though any sites that regularly mention or link to local businesses and include address/phone info and descriptions become sources for discovery, and possibly rankings, too. They may not have the trusted feed or the same direct effect, but it appears that in some competitive SERPs, they're making the difference (NOTE: If you know lots more about Places rankings than I and have tested this, please do leave a comment).
An example:
To find these opportunities is, thankfully, not that hard. Here's a few searches to get you started (just replace the cityname or business type with your own):
From there, you can expand, get creative and likely build some serious citation power.
#4 - Social Profiles w/ a Local Focus
Given the expansion of data sources/types that Google's using, social profiles, where you can often add information about your business including name/address/phone/site/etc. make a lot of sense. Here's an example:
Sites like Formspring, About.me, Quora, Twitter, Facebook, Hunch, OpenForum, Slideshare, etc. all offer potential, and you can likely find many more.
#5 - Cityname + Business Type + Listings/Businesses/Results
These are simple searches to perform, but again, I didn't see them mentioned in my review of many recommendations-style posts. An example:
Using this sample query
The idea is simply to find places that you might not have discovered through competitive analysis, either because your competitors aren't there or because Google's not showing them in the "more about this place" or "reviews from around the web" sets. In the former case, they're definitely worth nabbing, in the latter case, it's a less sure ROI, but potentially worth the effort, particularly if you've already exhausted the other opportunities.
If you have great recommendations for earning Google Places / Maps / Local citations, please do add them in the comments! I'll be among those handing out the thumbs up :-)
Very cool tips...
mine: local bloggers... using the blog search and using a specific long term search query you can find them.
For instance: search query > Seattle yogurt
results in Google Blog Search >> https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=seattle+yogurt&tbm=blg
If you are in the cooking field, I would check for potential links with Google Recipe...
I think we can officially make that 6 great tactics!! Thanks Rand and now gfiorelli (and probably loads more people as they join in!!!)
Thanks for adding and letting us one more feature but I think in recipes section you will lost the element of local search.
Have a look at the search link which you posted and in third link you are getting Makhani Chicken (that recipe from India).
Good idea capturing the recipe search! Trying to pull traffic back to your site
Very late props. But, props none the less Gianluca. Very interesting point on the recipe idea
Nice Rand, and to answer you question above....Yes, any site indexed that has your (NAP) information can show up/ and help rank for the old school places algo, and the new integrated one as well (just not as much).
One thing that seems to really tip the scale are pages that link + have citation information. Most do this naturally by having a url field but as mentioned above, local news + blog sites are KILLER for picking up strong link/citation combos and really really can help for the integrated O Pack.
One thing to keep in mind with all of this though is as followed... I have stopped looking at citations for rankings as the new local algo seems to have diminished weight on these. I look at citations as more of a way to "prove" your location. So, extremely competitive local serps are now heavily dominated by...
1. Local Domain Authority - Making sure your link profile and Onsite Optimization is solid. BEST FOR INCREASING RANKINGS
2. Exactness In Location - Keeping everything consistent (Name, address, and phone) mainly helps to ensure no duplicates occur and allows Places to trust that your Website is matched to the Business information. BEST FOR KEEPING WEBSITE TIED TO LISTING
3. Legitimacy in Reviews - What most people fail to realize is that a lot of sites have a single page for a single review left. This page also will generally have business information (NAP) on it. So, reviews=citation + recommendation recommendation recommendation recommendation recommendation FOR GETTING A BETTER CLICK THROUGH RATE.
Great post! Now my 2 cents:
Don't dig too much in "More about this place" section. There are MANY citations that are randomly attached to almost every Google listing due to similiarities in company name, address, phone number, etc. Your competion can use manipulative tactics like stealing citations (by using phone from another company for example), and you can ruin your whole day researching links that you will never get.
The other problem with local citations is that they need time... I mean TIME... more time... even more time to get to your Places page. So when you "build" citations think more about the opportunity to popularize your brand to a specific community (in niche forums for example) or to die hard users of some kind service (Yelp, foursquare). Believe me, I've waited 9 months for a link from Yellowbot. There are number of good directories that can help your listing in a short term, but if you need tons of citations to get to the first page you'll have to wait a lot or be extra creative. ;)
Hey Rand always a big fan of the local posts as it seems like an area that so many people ignore and that is becoming more and more prevelant in the "normal" universal search results. Interestingly, yesterday over on Blumenthal's they posted a story that brings in another largely under-valued tactic/resource and that's microformats and highlight the fact that Google Places are now showing upcoming events for some venues. It may not be applicable for all clients but I think it is another indicator that Google increasingly wants to be a bit of a one-stop shop for people to find information but also that it provides an opportunity to make your venue stick out in the results.
Definitely think it's worth a read for folks to check out this post from Mike as (although it's not strictly relevant to the points you're making here) it is a clear opportunity to gain an edge for some businesses in the local space.
Great five more actions points for local search. We have tried uploading geo-tagged pictures at our Google Places account and find a correlation between the increase in rankings within Google maps.
I hesitated to share this tip, but I love all you mozzers, so here it is.
Further to Rand's point about citations from social profiles, want to get 300 of them overnight? Pay only $600 and Knowem.com will manually submit to 300 sites for you. Just make sure you sneak the business address and phone number into the bio field to make sure you're getting that citation from all sites.
SEOmoz Pro members can save 10%
https://www.seomoz.org/dp/premium-discount-store
Woot!
Speaking of that discount store, I'd like to offer a discount to SEOmoz Pro users for my Local Citation Finder.
https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/
How do I get that setup? I sent an email about it a few weeks ago, but I may have sent it to the wrong people.
To be frank, I hate to see comments like this (and suggestions like Rand's #4 above) where people are recommending that local business owners create social/forum profiles that they never plan to use and stuff their business name and address in there in the hopes of getting a citation.
It's spam and, as someone who runs a few popular forums/social sites, it's really becoming an ugly and time-consuming plague to have to delete all the crap people are doing in the name of local SEO.
It's true. Using knowem for this purpose IS really spammy. To be fair, I don't think Rand's promoting anything too spammy in the post. I think he's more suggesting that you can drop citations into the profiles you already have.
That's not how I read it, Darren. The suggestion is to go out and "find" social sites and forums, create a profile, and put your NAP in it.
Whoa whoa. I think your criticism only stands if people are creating useless, non-value-add social profiles without any intent to contribute positively (in which case, they're likely to get very few links/attention to those profiles and have them pass very little value). My intent was certainly not to suggest that - we're all about authentic creation+use of citations, content and participation here at Moz.
I'm sorry to say that actually I read it the same way as Matt. Especially this passage: "and you can likely find many more." I would suggest a little editting of this part of the article. Although the tip is nice, it could be misunderstood and lead to almost useless spamming. I suppose most business owners would understand it that way. The business owners should definitely understand that if they create social profiles they would need to actively use them, otherwise the benefits would be minor to negative.
Agreed that the majority of business owner will create or have social profiles created and never develop them. Any ideas on how to encourage clients to take control and actually use these profiles?
Great tips Rand!
We might have to scan for some of this stuff inside LocalSearchToolkit.com (totally free). I'll speak with our developer about how to automate this process. Great to see more local coverage here at the Moz!
Cheers!Mike
One thing that helped me a ton was just googling the phone number of a competitor. After I finished all the citations around my local area, I went to the big cities surrounding me and did the same thing for those companies. Correct, some citations won't be relevant for your city but it helped me a ton. Bigger companies in bigger cities tend to have many more than the local companies here.
Also, whenever I have an area for text (or company description). I took the liberty to place my information in there. It's very important to have the same info, so I copy/paste my info all the time. (I have a mac so I made a 'sticky note' with my info so it was easily accessible all the time)
Could you explain what you mean by '"googling comp phone number"? I'm really new to this process
In my line of work, local search is key. Going after the lead key terms can only get you so far, but specific term match optimised pages are the ones that truly convert for me. Some great tips, I'll most likely be using them on Google this evening now! Thanks Rand.
Love that the content on this site always just keeps helping me throughout time. This post is still great for local SEOs like myself. Thanks as always Moz!
These are some great ideas! I don't think I've ever considered using the Discussions feature to search to new link building opportunities. Hitting a link building wall can be extremely frustrating, but clearly it doesn't have to be! You just have to change your tactics.
Seriously, I never even considered the discussions part of google, but it sheds light on the fact that utilizing more of their different areas of search can help build links and optimize local listings.
Its really very very informative. Rand you are always doing great. But how to I earn Google plus business review?
I always like to check out in Google Places the section "More about this place" - there are always some great link possibilities listed.As well as Google Alerts, Google Sites https://sites.google.com/ etc. Google has tons of possibilities to grab a citation or some linking possibilities.
I can't believe I didn't think to look at Google Discussion for links!
Thanks for the great post; it was very helpful.
I was just about to post the same thing, great tool and very under used (particually by me!)
images is actually a really good way to get brand recognition :) we do that often - but i've never tried the whole discussion thing... sounds interesting.
i'd like to do some testing on it and will post some of the results i see :)
thanks for the advice!
I like to use discussions, make some changes and monitor only recently started ones. that are obvious linking oportunities that are very easy to score. boosting up relevancy in 5 minutes almost :)
Man I cannot wait to share this post. That discussion search idea has been staring me in the face for years and I never saw it. Thanks for the wake up.
Really good stuff here on citations. I like to see people thinking a bit outside of the box in this regard.
On a related note, I'd recommend people look into building backlinks TO these citation resources / directory websites themselves. They are SERP animals in and of themselves, and MANY of them let you use CUSTOM BUSINESS URLs as well. It constantly amazes me how many businesses don't use this feature. It is very easy to have multiple listings on the front page and dominate some geo-terms organically with these types of websites all over the front page...makes initial reputation management a SNAP!
We've been analyzing our results at Local Lasso when doing manual mass citation / business directory submissions for local SEOs and Offline marketers throughout the U.S. over the past few months, and I'm telling you, using these sites to "piggy back" on for additional local search landscape domination is a true timesaver and their local authority abosutely ROCKS! Clients are often impatient and want to see clear visible results, if you optimize these types of local directory websites correctly you WILL see results, typically a lot quicker than simplying optimizing your client's websites...unless of course your client's already have high pr, age, and authority in the local scene already...
- Jim w/ Local Lasso
Awesome kid of post. This gives some indepth idea to work on one of my client website, where it lost local rankings recently.
I think Google Places one one of the hot seo process to get top in local search in google searching.
Hi Rand,
We know you love showing off local Seattle results so please feel free to use Seattle Auto Detailing in your next blogutorial and feel free to point out OR beat-up on www.northwestautosalon.com. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to see them putting all the pieces together from viral videos to optimized images, and strong internal linking architecture all to be a top local business. If you ever need your Vespa detailed they will probably take care of that too!
Rand, you must know the ADD TO YOUR MAP option in Flickr, have you tried it out already, anyway thanks for those infos !
Love it Rand! I ran out of ideas/places for more great citations. Thx. My juice is flowing again.
Thanks Rand. I saw a post recently about the potential impact of Foursquare Check-ins as a local signal governing rankings. Do you believe check-ins factor into Local SEO? If so, how? Thanks!
Great article. We are focusing a lot on local although we have a lot of clients national/international. Already seeing a boost based on local citations. Need a game plan to research competitors using the tips above. Just not enough time in a day!
Thank you to open my mind using image info for local seo.
i have used this technique for my website www.armstrongsecurity.co.uk on facebook, but citation doesn,t seem to be seen on searches yet...
Useful tips!!
In discussions you can have a better opportunity if you change the time in Google search. I would adjust the time to "Past 24 hours" or use custom range to participate in discussion forums/community/answers.
It always astonishes me to see how fast the SEO industry changes. I wonder how the content of this post would have changed with Google now not showing the reviews of 3rd party companies such as Yelp.
I was not aware about what is "Google Places Citation" I work online from home and a client has been asked for this to do for him. But I was really don't know. So, I have put this keyword on google. There were a lot of links describing about this term. But here I have found a reasonable answer.
Kuldeep Singh
Hi Rand,
Thank you so much for leading me along paths I hadn't even figured out they could exist in the world of SEO for local businesses. Talk about competitive intelligence indeed!
To tell you the truth, I've just started to learn the basics of SEO applied to local businesses (even started blogging about my first steps into this vast world). My feeling is, I could pretty well apply these tactics for one of my customers who's planning on selling ancient photos through a brand new website. All of his photos (50K+) have one or several keywords attached to them, most of them relating to specific places. Am I then a fool to believe he could outrank some of his competitors simply by applying some of these?
- Jean-Marie
[link removed]
Great suggestions Rand. Local is definitely becoming more important, especially with the accelerating adoption of smartphones and the incorporation of search into peoples mobile lifestyles.
I would add the following for thought/discussion. For our business, we have been working the Local Search Ecosystem with the assumption that three large local business data aggregators, localeze, InfoUSA (ExpressUpdateUSA) and Acxiom all have correct business info as it is our understanding that these three actively feed a number of other key local listing sites which in turn provide active (some passive) feeds to Google Places.
Since this propogation of active and passive feeds can take months (or longer in some cases to reach Google Places through the intermediaries, we are also working the key listings bottoms up (Bing Local, Yahoo! Local, Yellowpages.com, Yelp etc.).
Question regarding recommendations: We have incorporated requesting recommendations into our workflow, but have seen mixed advice on whether requesting customer provide a review on Google places can be detrimental. What is the downside of this as long as they are from registered Google users and entered by a real client. Is is from a ranking standpoint to have all 5 star ratings? To diversify, we also request reviews for users on Yahoo! local, Bing, and YellowPages.com since sometimes Google decides whether or not to show a customer review.
Great article Rand with a lot of tips that I didn't think it could be possible to do. Specially for #5 - Cityname + Business type...
Sometimes in the blog posts, some tips that are shared don't really apply for none-english language website, but not for this one.
I'm glad that local seo tips are increasingly shared to the community. Almost all of my clients are locals so thanks for the powerful stuff.
(sorry for my english..) :)
Great tips Rand and am loving the fact that you are adding more "local" and Google Places tips.
This is a great example of some of the low hanging fruit that most forget about, like image SEO and non-google SEO. Great post!
Very useful tips. Thanks for sharing.
Local is hot right now and is only going to gain in importance. Keep the local tips rolling!
Hi Rand, fantastic post. I've been involved with optimising clients' Google Places posts via citations for some time and having exhausted the strategy suggested in your previous post on the subject, this couldn't have come at a better time.
Just one thing though... Is the search string in #5 correct? Should it be something like "seattle yogurt listings OR businesses OR results" instead? Otherwise, you're saying "listings OR seattle," "businesses OR seattle" and "seattle," "yoghurt" and "results" aren't affected by the "OR" operator? I don't use advanced search operators all that often so apologies if I'm wrong, but it might be worth adjusting in case it misleads SEOmoz readers who give it a try and don't get its 100% potential.
hi there, sorry for my bad english, i'm from italy...
question: lots of people that "check in" with google latitude can improve in local serch ranking?
google latitude app is now ready for android, iphone and other mobile OS....
what you think about this?
Not sure about it, but it could be taken as Social Sign, therefore having a weight, even though not so strong as others local ranking factors.
Excellent blog post.
With the local searches having more importance, this is a great step by step guide.
Localisation is seemingly the way that things are going.
Great information about the "Discussions" Search! That should come in handy for businesses that need to do some serious competitor intelligence and reports on their competitors.
The hReview Microformat from Google's Rich snippets is really helping us. Basically we are piggy backing off Google Search Results by having our rich review content appearing on the search results of local businesses as well as the Google Places pages of those local listings.
Would recommend this to everyone.
Nice tips !
Hope that all the Google Places option will be available in Canada, like Google Boost
Very valuable information here, thanks. I love the discussion search option, that one never crossed my mind.
Google places I think has been one of the best search engine optimization tools that they have come up with in a long time. Thanks for the new tips too on doing things a little bit differently with seo.
Nice post. I'll be implementing and testing. Thanks.
Attending a SEMPO event here in AZ tonight on this very topic. Will definitely compare what is shared w/ everything you've mentioned Rand. All great ideas! (Thx!)
Nice one Rand. Will look forward to use it.
Would directory submissions count as local citations?? Particularly local business directories and the like?
A local citation can be anything that includes your business name, address, and/or phone number. Doesn't matter where it appears. (Well, the value of it may depend on where it appears, but my point is that anything can provide a citation.)
So many different locations to be visible sometimes difficult to keep up with everything! These are def. nice little areas to gain some extra exposure for yourself.
Hey Rand,
Great post. People are asking us everyday, "what are the easiest ways to SEO my site?" or "how do I get links and backlinks for my site?", but no one really takes the time to learn.
It's good to see some people are getting more creative with how they do things in this Internet world we live in today.
Regards,
PlonkaInteractive