Local search is one of those areas where businesses go looking for a clever trick and then trip over something on their own front doorstep. Before anyone talks about tactics, I want to know whether the basics are even in place, and more often than not they are not.
The foundation is your name, address and phone number, and whether they are identical everywhere they appear. Same spelling, same abbreviation for street, same phone format, across your own site and every directory and listing that mentions you. These are usually called citations, and consistency matters more than volume. Google is trying to be confident that all these mentions are the same business. If your address is written four different ways across the web, you are making that harder for no reason.
This month Google folded its various local and social products into a single thing called Google My Business. Before this you had Places, and the Google+ Local pages, and a general sense of not knowing which dashboard did what. Bringing it under one roof is overdue and makes the day to day management less of a maze. If you have not logged in and claimed or checked your listing since the change, that is the first job. Make sure the category is right, the opening hours are current, and the map pin is actually on your building and not the middle of the street.
The things I would get right, roughly in order:
- Claim and complete the Google My Business listing. Correct category, hours, description, a decent photo or two.
- Fix citation consistency. Audit where you are listed, correct the mismatches, kill any duplicate listings that have sprung up over the years.
- Reviews. Ask happy customers, make it easy, respond to the ones you get. This is slow and there is no shortcut, and it is one of the clearest signals a business is real and active.
- On-page basics. The town or area you serve should appear naturally in your page copy, titles and contact details. Not stuffed, just present, because a lot of small business sites somehow never mention where they actually are.
None of this is exciting and none of it is new. The reason I keep coming back to it is that the businesses winning locally are usually not doing anything clever. They have claimed the listing, kept it accurate, earned some genuine reviews, and not confused the search engines about who and where they are. The clever stuff only starts paying off once that groundwork is solid, and most of the time the groundwork alone gets you most of the way.
