Don’t Overlook these Local SEO Tools

Many local search marketers do a good job of getting ranked favorably, but there are still some helpful local SEO tools that get overlooked. When marketing local businesses online, analyze whether you could be passing up these opportunities:

Data Aggregators

Often, local search marketers are great at optimizing Google Places pages, Yelp listings, and Yahoo Local profiles. Depending on the industries they are marketing, they may even be skilled at leveraging other local directories: TripAdvisor, for instance, or Citysearch. But why stop there? After all, Google crawls thousands of sites with business data on a daily basis. To overlook those sites is like willfully turning away the opportunity to have your data aggregated by those directories.

Without naming them specifically, we can tell you that there are some primary data aggregators that can help local businesses gain more visibility. A good SEO company knows what they are, and can submit its clients’ information to those databases to optimize rankings.

Local Landing Pages

Because you do a good job of optimizing your local profiles (like those mentioned above), a user found your location on his search results page: Great! But what happens when he clicks your result? The link should take him to a locally optimized landing page. It’s important to maintain a landing page for each location of a business, optimized with local keywords, because Google needs additional pages to crawl that contain your local keywords.

As Matt Cutts has said, “If you want your store pages to be found, it’s best to have a unique, easily crawlable URL for each store.” He has acknowledged that this is an organic ranking factor with major influence on the local algorithm.

Engagement

That’s right: The word that marketers love to hate is highly overlooked in local SEO. The fact is, people are going to talk about local businesses no matter what, using social media or review platforms like Facebook, Google Places and Yelp. Those businesses may as well engage with the audience to steer the conversation in a positive direction. It’s a simple customer service principle: thanking people for positive comments, and making reparations with anyone who had a negative experience. For local SEO, engagement is the most powerful form of brand evangelism.

Whether you are a business owner or an SEO that markets local businesses, ask yourself if you are leveraging these local SEO tools to the fullest. The Los Angeles SEO professionals at Crest Media know from experience how effective these tools can be.