Local search is a crucial part of marketing a small business.
While it is always good to get customers from around the globe, your goal should be to have a dominant presence in your hometown. While local search marketing can certainly be beneficial to eCommerce businesses, it is especially important to Brick and Mortar businesses that need customers coming in off the streets.

Following are a few pointers to keep in mind.

Local Keywords

While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords.

For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”,  “Music, Nicholasville KY”, and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city.

Pay Attention to Local OneBox AND Google Maps

There is more than one method of capturing local searches on Google and it is important not to only utilize one of them. Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea has a great SEMMY-nominated article on this matter I would suggest reading.

By the way, Slawski also has a wonderful glossary for local search on Google that could prove extremely helpful.

Trust and Authority

Of course links are important in any SEO campaign, but if you want to rank up there with the big boys, you need quality ones. You may have submitted your site to a slew of business directories that can get you links, but are the ones you’re submitting to authoritative?

In an interview with Michael Gray, SEOBook author Aaron Wall says, “Before a local business spends money submitting to any of these business directories they should make sure they submit to the Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, and get at least a few other links so they have enough link equity to outrank the general directories for their own brand specific searches, and hopefully some more general local ones as well.”

Of course these points are just the tip of the iceberg. There is a ton of information out there that can help you on your way to getting your local business found by people in your area. What other tips come to your mind?