Did you know that more than 80% of people use search engines to find local business information? And that 50% of those performing a local search actually visit the business within a day?
Well, it’s true!
As such, it’s important that you work as a business to put your location(s) on the map with local SEO.
As fate may have it, as Google becomes more advanced, so does the practice of local SEO. In my guest post for Tentacle Inbound, an inbound marketing firm, I walk through 5 simple local SEO tactics you can do as a business owner to help show up for those 80% of folks performing local searches.
But because I like you guys, I also want to give you some bonus information about how to show up in what’s called the “Local 3-pack.” This is important because nearly 45% of all clicks now go to businesses who show up in this coveted real estate.
How to Get Your Business in Google’s Local Three-Pack:
In essence, there are three main things Google looks at when determining which businesses to display for local search queries like the one shown above:
1) Relevance is how closely the business’s offerings match up with the search query. This is really driven by how your business listing is optimized (title, description, etc) and the categories chosen to mark up your business, so be sure to perform local listing optimization to help out with this. Additionally, even the keywords on your website(s) are considered part of relevancy, so optimizing your main .com is also important.
2) Distance is basically just proximity to the searcher, as this is obviously a determining factor of what shows up in Google Maps. There’s not much you can do to influence this factor, except make sure that your addresses are all up-to-date so that Google can see how close you are to the searcher.
3) Prominence is essentially Google’s term for “brand authority / trust.” Aside from relevance, this is the factor we can really impact with our SEO efforts, as prominence takes into account things like number of backlinks, ratings and reviews, quality and quantity of keywords that your brand is ranking for, domain authority, and website traffic volume. This calls for a well-rounded SEO strategy, which a
consultant or agency can definitely help you with.
So in general, influencing those local search results seems to be a combination of local listing optimization and general website optimization.
