Posted by: Kayla Wagner, Project Manager

Are you a business that needs to come up in local searches? Here are some tips to make sure you’re covered and competitive:

1. On your site, make sure your address and contact information are listed in an easy-to-find location (perhaps the footer of every page) – and in proper HCard format! HCard format allows the search engine spiders to crawl your address and see it in a standard, easy to read format and import it into their map tools.

2. Do you have your location in your site content? You should! If you want to come up in search results for “Denver plumbers” you should have “Denver plumbers” in your site content. Not just plumbers and not just Denver or Colorado. Include relevant keywords to all areas of your purchase cycle including general terms (dentist), general + regional (dentist in denver), business name (Dr. Peters dental), and services (root canal).

3. Ensure you appear in all the “local players”: search engines, internet yellow pages (IYPs), local guides, online newspapers, local niche targets, maps and mobile.
a. Submit your business to local business listings including Google Business Directory (this will ensure you’re on  Google Maps), Yahoo! Local and MSN Local.
b. IYP’s include yellowbook.com, superpages.com, infospace.com, local.com and dexknows.com.
c. And then there are the local guides/resources: judysbook.com, craigslist, openlist, magicyellow, city search,  yelp, troubleshooter.com, angieslist, servicemagic, bbb.org, etc. Make sure each links back to your site with  correct, up-to-date information. Map sites pull review sites into their maps listings, so it’s important that  you’re in both.

4. Are you mobile compatible? These days, local often means mobile, and with iPhone’s growing market share, you want your website and listings to be available online and on mobile phones. Find out if you are mobile compatible here: http://validator.w3.org/mobile/. Another piece of mobile is being available via SMS listings. If someone were to text Google or to call Goog 411, you want to be there! Submission to Google’s local business listing, and Microsoft’s “tell me” should take care of this.