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Apple Maps is here to stay and with several hundred million devices using it as their default map search by mid 2013, now is the time to ensure your business is positioned to rank well. So what's the key to Apple Maps? Well, you have to take a look at where they get their data. Taking a look at Apple Maps expert Andrew Shotland's recent slidedeck from SMX West, the key data sources in the U.S. are...

Business Listings:

1. Localeze
2. Acxiom
3. Factual

Review Data:

1. Yelp

So, step 1 for improving your Apple Maps rankings is to make sure your data is accurate, consistent, and as comprehensive as possible with the above data providers, then, make sure you're doing all that you can on Yelp. 

Yelp is one of the most important places (next to Google) that any local business can grow its online profile and reviews. If you've spent any time on Apple Maps you already know how much data it currently pulls from Yelp. Combine that with the fact that Siri, Apple's conversational iOS search assistant, uses Yelp as its go-to source for data on local businesses and it's easy to see why Yelp needs to be one of the top places you focus on building out your local profile.

Now that the importance of Yelp is crystal clear the big question is - How can you help your business rank better on Yelp? In a word...reviews!

 

Be sure Your listing is Claimed, Accurate and NOT Duplicated

However, before you get too focused on reviews it's vital that you take the time to be sure that your Yelp listing is accurate and up to date. You also need to be aware that, unlike many local directory sites, Yelp does NOT require verification before allowing users to post a new business listing. This leads to duplicate listings, which can be damaging to your business. They split up your reviews, confuse customers and can even compete with each other for rankings.

Yelp's community managers are supposed to manage duplicates, but we wouldn't recommend relying on that. You need to actively check for duplicate listings of your business and if you find any, email Yelp to have them removed as soon as possible. Of course, that doesn't stop another user from creating another new listing, so check back on a regular basis to be sure dupes aren't being created. For detailed information on removing duplicate Yelp listings as well as duplicates on other sites, please see this great post from Nyagoslav Zhekov.

Claiming (Yelp refers to it as unlocking) and actively managing your own listing(s) is how you get current hours, special offers and other details in front of perspective customers. You'll also be able you to receive alerts when new reviews are posted, allowing you to respond to them as needed. To get the most out of your claimed Yelp listing, follow the advice in this post on the Review Trackers blog.

 

How Does Yelp Rank Businesses?

Here's what Yelp says about its search algorithm:

How is the ranking of search results determined? Yelp's search results are based on an algorithm that is designed to provide the best results based on a number of different factors including review text, ratings, and number of reviews. We are constantly working on improving our search results so that we can deliver the most relevant local results to our users.

Yelp has always been ALL about community interaction and the prime driver of this interaction is reviews. Reviewers gain prominence for their opinions by being active members of the community. People who contribute a lot of reviews and interact frequently with other Yelpers can gain Elite Status. Those who don't participate much will have their reviews filtered out and rarely seen at all.

Here's a great video Yelp released explaining how reviews work within their system as well as how they filter them.

 

How Do You Increase Your Yelp Rankings?

The most obvious way to rank well in searches on Yelp is by getting more reviews than your competitors. However, the catch is that these reviews need to stick rather than get filtered out. Any efforts to get fans to leave their opinions on Yelp are totally wasted if those people aren't active Yelpers. So, logically you need to find an easy way to separate your customers so that you can push non-active Yelp users to a platform (like Google) where their reviews will have the most impact.

On the flip side, getting solid reviews from active and even Elite Yelpers can have a very powerful impact on your rankings. Here's what Yelp tells us about Elite Yelpers:0

What is the "Yelp Elite Squad"? The Yelp Elite Squad is our way of recognizing and rewarding yelpers who are active evangelists and role models, both on and off the site. Elite-worthiness is based on a number of things, including well-written reviews, a fleshed-out personal profile, an active voting and complimenting record, and playing nice with others. Members of the Elite Squad are designated by a shiny Elite badge on their account profile. If you think you or someone you know might be ready to be Yelp Elite, visit http://www.yelp.com/elite.

Here's an example of a Yelp Elite's profile and as you can see, much of it's related to community activity:

Elite Yelpers are so influential that some business owners have been caught offering to pay them for good reviews. Yelp will publicly shame you and add a "consumer alert" notice to your listing if they catch you trying to solicit reviews. They are very strict about NOT incentivizing reviews in any way. Doing so can result in the loss of your listing and being banned from the directory.

However, we still feel it's important that you know how to find those Elite users just in case one stumbles in your door or happens to already be a customer of yours. Use the following search in Google (hat tip to David Mihm) - be sure to change the city (san diego) to the one you're searching for:

"title="Elite 2012""san diego site: yelp.com/user_details

Yelp users may choose to sort their search by Highest Rated. Face it, you want to go to the best places, not the mediocre ones, so getting good ratings will get your listing in front of more Yelpers in cases like this.

Yelp also looks for useful details when answering a search from within its reviews interface. So, if reviewers tend to rave about your egg rolls in reviews, you have a better chance of ranking well for egg rolls than other Chinese restaurants. You can try to influence customers to mention the longer tail terms in their reviews that you really want to rank well for by offering specials and coupons for them.

The Yelp results for egg rolls in Houston are much different than the results for Chinese restaurant because Yelp ranks the highest rated restaurants that also have egg rolls mentioned in reviews about them:

Searchers can also sort their results by Best Match. If you're smart enough to have a good keyword term in your business name, that'll help you rank for that term if it's searched for. However, this won't work for generic terms, like Chinese Restaurant but is effective for longer tail queries, like egg rolls.

Name, address and phone number (NAP) consistency are always important to your local search rankings efforts. So be sure that your Yelp listing matches what's on your website, at Localeze, Acxiom and Factual, and in all the other trusted online directories you have profiles.

Check ins are also growing in importance - the more the better. Since you can now check in to a venue directly from Apple Maps, the overall number of check ins on Yelp will increase and may have even more of an impact on rankings in the future. Only time will tell on that one but be prepared.

Apple Maps will continue to improve and grow over time. It's already on hundreds of millions of iDevices and rumor has it that it'll soon be part of the new MAC OS X, which will put it on Mac desktops and laptops, too. With that many people getting Apple Maps as their default map, ranking well matters and right now, ranking well in Yelp is the best way to get there.

Here's to working smart instead of hard!

Brought to you by the experts at SearchEngineNews.com. Who have had their finger on the pulse of the SEO industry for 16 years. Reading every mainstream blog, talking with industry insiders and separating what works from what doesn't - ALL so you don't have to. Learn more and qualify for a FREE copy of their Award Winning SEO Book Today!

A citation is any mention of your business out on the web, with or without a link. It can come in various forms:

• Company Name, by itself.
• Company name & phone number.
• Company name, phone number, & address.
• Company name, phone number, address, & link.
• etc.

Even just the phone number by itself can be a citation. Hat tip to Nyagoslav Zhekov. See his comment below.

A complete citation should include the company name, address, and phone number. A citation that does not include all three of these is sometimes referred to as a partial citation.

 

Why Do Citations Matter?

Citations are a key factor in local search rankings. Citation related factors make up 25% of the top twenty factors in David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors.

In a recent presentation at LocalU Advanced in Baltimore, David Mihm presented the following breakdown of local ranking factors. He added a disclaimer that this is based solely on his opinion, but as one of the most prominent thought leaders in Local SEO, we take his opinion seriously around here.

For more information on why citations are important for local search rankings, please see this excellent article on GetListed.org: Why Citations Are Important to Your Local Business Listings.

 

Structured Citations

The most common citations are found on business listing sites like yellowpages.com, yelp.com, superpages.com, etc. These are referred to as structured citations.

 

Unstructured Citations

Citations can also often be found on blogs, newspaper websites, event listing websites, job websites, government sites, etc. These are referred to as unstructured citations and can be extremely valuable to your local rankings.

 

Finding Structured AND Unstructured Citations

We occasionally get questions from Local Citation Finder users about how "useful" the results are. They'll ask us why they can't submit to some of the sites returned in the results. The reason is because the Local Citation Finder is a competitive analysis tool for citations. When you run a keyword search, it finds the business that are ranking locally, then finds their citations, both structured and unstructured. It doesn't only help you find sites that have a simple "submit your business" option. It also helps you understand the competition's citation building strategy by showing you where they are getting unstructured citations as well.

 

Not All Citations Are Created Equal

There is huge variation in the value of different citations. A mention of your business' name, address, and phone number on whitehouse.gov is worth far more than a mention of your business on some spammy web directory that was created solely for low quality link building. For some advice on sorting the gold from the sand, take a look at this post on determining citation quality.

 

If you have any questions about citations, please leave them in the comments. We'll answer them and possibly add more information to the post.

 

Here at Whitespark we look at thousands of citation sites for our citation building service. Just as with links, not all citation sources are created equal, so it's super important that you are careful with where you submit. Some citations are going to help your rankings, and other citations could hurt your rankings.

To determine the quality of a citation source, we consider the following for every site we submit to:

1) Quality of link profile: Run a link report in MajesticSEO (I suggest Majestic because it has a deeper crawl and tends to report on more of the lower quality sites than OpenSiteExplorer). Does it look like a ton of exact match anchor text links from blog comments, forums, bookmarking sites, and cheap article directories? That's a concern and it indicates a site we will likely want to exclude.

2) Is it part of a network? There are some business listing networks out there that will create listings on dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of additional domains when you submit to one. This can create a massive link spike from low quality directory sites and actually hurt your rankings. You can test this by looking for a footprint from the site that will likely appear on all other sites (look in the footer). Search Google for that footprint (in quotes) and it may reveal other sites in their network. Now, to see if listings are distributed across all their network of sites, you can look at any listing on the site to get a phone number, then run a phone number search combined with the footprint like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22_footprint_here_%22+%22_phone_number_here_%22. If it looks like listings are being distributed across a ton of sites, avoid.

3) PageRank: a low PR could be a red flag. You can't immediately rule out a site based on this, but it does indicate that you should take a closer look at other metrics. There are cases where a site is new and might not have PR yet, so, as long as the other metrics check out ok, it could be good to submit to.

4) SEOMoz DA: Get this from Open Site Explorer. Ideally, DA will be 30 or greater for the sites we submit to. Again, a site with less than 30 for DA could still be ok to use as long as other metrics check out.

5) Number of Indexed Pages: Run a "site:www.domain.com" search in Google on the site. If the number of indexed pages is low (less than 100), then that could be a red flag, depending on the nature of the site.

6) Number of linking root domains: Get this metric from Open Site Explorer. For a local or hyper-niche site, a low number is ok. If it's a really high number, this could be a red flag that indicates some spammy link building practices. See #1 in this case.

7) Domain Age: You can get this from the Wayback Machine. Look up the site like this: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.domain.com and look for text that says "going all the way back to _________". An older domain is generally better for a citation than a brand new domain, but not always. A new site with quality links is a better citation source than an old site with a super spammy link profile. Yes, I know you can get domain age from a whois search, but I prefer using the Wayback Machine because people can sit on domains for years before a site ever appears on it.

8) Check if they rank: Take a look at the homepage title tag. It will typically have the brand name in it. Run a search for that brand name. If the site doesn't even rank on the first page for their own brand name, that is a red flag.

9) Visual check: This is a tough one to use as a metric to assess quality because sites that were developed in 1996 and haven't had the design updated could still be awesome citation sources. You're looking for spam signals here, moreso than design quality. Does the site look like a big pile of spam? It probably is.

Really, there is no simple formula we can apply to determine citation source quality. You have to use your best judgement. A small local site that lists businesses in a small town might have low PR, low DA, hardly any links, very few indexed pages, and terrible design, but could still be an excellent citation source for a business in that community. In my opinion, the key metrics to check would be "quality of link profile" and "is it part of a network". If it fails either of those, avoid.

It's worth it to spend the time to weed out the good citations from the bad ones, because when Google sees your nice, clean citation profile they'll be all:

Do you have any additional checks that you consider when assessing citation quality? Leave a comment!

 

Save on our citation building services!

Good news! We've scaled up our citation building capacity and from now until January 11th, you can take advantage of a $1 discount per citation for all quantities and countries covered by our service. That's $3 per generic citation and $4 per local & niche citation, up to 25% off!

 

To take advantage of this deal:

1. Set up your order on our order form here: http://www.whitespark.ca/citation-building-submission-service
2. Before you hit the Continue button at the bottom, type the konami code on your keyboard: ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA
3. This will reveal our secret coupon code field, where you can enter: HOLIDAYS2012 to get the discount.

 

What's up with the whole Konami Code business? We're just geeks, and we think it's fun.

So, have some fun and put some juicy, well-built, high-quality, citations in your (or your clients') stockings this year.

Any questions, just leave a comment!

 

You may know that some local-business directory sites "feed" reviews to each other. That is, a customer writes a review of your business on one site, and later that review also gets published on other sites.

You know how this works if you've seen my Local Business Reviews Ecosystem for the US.

But the "reviews ecosystem" isn't the same everywhere.  Different countries have different directory sites that list local businesses.  Which means each country has a unique mixture of sites that customers can visit to post reviews of businesses they like or don't like.

Canada has its own lineup of reviews sites - and therefore also has its own reviews ecosystem.

Any business owner who wants better local rankings (particularly in Google) and wants more local customers needs a review-gathering campaign.  But you only have a finite number of customers, and inevitably not everyone you ask will end up writing you a review.  So you want your reviews to count.

One way to get the most local visibility out of your reviews is to ask your customers to review you on sites that feed reviews to other sites in your country.

If you own a business in Canada, the first step to getting the most "bang" out of your reviews is to know which review sites in Canada will spread your reviews farthest across the Web. 

I give you the Canadian Reviews Ecosystem:

(click image to enlarge - or get the PDF)

There are a few conclusions you can draw just from looking at the Ecosystem (especially if you compare it to the one for the US):

1.  YellowPages.ca is huge.  In the Canadian Ecosystem, YellowPages is the big slobbering bull moose.  But instead of feeding on every plant (or unlucky hunter) in sight, it feeds other sites.  By my count, it feeds reviews to as many sites as Yelp does (4), but those sites include still-important Yahoo as well as CanPages.

Also, as David Mihm notes, YellowPages.ca is the #1 most-important citation site in Canada - so important that, as he points out, some Google+Local listings say "Business Listings Distributed by YellowPages.ca."

You can also see this in David's "Local Search Ecosystem in Canada" graphic (which, as you probably noticed, is kind of a big influence on the layout I've used for the Reviews Ecosystem).

2.  Yelp reviews are important in Canada, as they seem to be everywhere else.  3 of the review sites that Yelp feeds seem to be pretty small fry (at least I'd never heard of them before), though having good reviews fed to those sites may bring a wee bit of extra exposure to your business.  Plus, Yelp's partnership with Apple Maps will make Yelp reviews a lot more "contagious." 

3.  The Ecosystem in Canada isn't as complex (i.e. horribly tangled and messy) as it is in the US.  One reason simply is there are fewer sites that actually feed reviews to other sites.  That's obvious if you just compare the numbers of green arrows.

But I also noticed a bunch of sites that neither fed reviews to nor received reviews from other sites.  This was the case with 411.ca, Brownbook.net, FindHere.ca, ShopinCanada.com, WikiDomo.com - which is why I didn't include them in the Ecosystem.

4.  WebLocal.ca gets reviews from all over the place.  It's the online equivalent of a hot dog - formed by a zillion different animals and ingredients being mashed together.

To put it another way, it's a collector but not a feeder of reviews.  (In this way it's the same as its US counterpart, YellowBot.com.)  Therefore, I'd say it's probably not the first place you should ask your customers to review you.

But for all I know WebLocal may get a ton of traffic - in which case it would be doubly worth getting reviews on the more-prominent "feeder" sites and making sure your WebLocal.ca profile is accurate and beefed-up with info on your business and services.

5.  In home-improvement industries HomeStars.com reviews are key.  It's a Toronto-based site, and although it also lists US businesses, it's pretty focused on Canadian businesses.

I was surprised at the sheer numbers of reviews on HomeStars - more specifically, the number of businesses that had hundreds of reviews apiece.  It also seems to be the only site that feeds N49.ca and GoldBook.ca (which themselves are prominent sites).

A few points that may not have jumped out at you from the Ecosystem:

• Relatively few Canadian businesses seem to have any reviews at all - at least when compared to businesses in the US.  This is especially the case on the smaller sites (e.g. GigPark), though it's also the case to a lesser extent on the big reviews sites (e.g. Yelp).  That means you probably have a golden opportunity to pull ahead of your competitors by racking up at least a few reviews - ideally on the more-influential sites.

• I'm guessing more reviews will get fed from site to site in the future.  Canada's local-search ecosystem is already pretty large and complex, and I wouldn't be surprised if more and more sites begin exchanging reviews.  (Which might mean extra work for me a few years from now if someone tells me "Hey, umm...your Canadian reviews ecosystem is, like, totally old and lame.")

• Probably 10-15% of the businesses I encountered copied some of their customer reviews from third-party sites and published them as testimonials on their sites.  Maybe just as many US businesses do this, but I didn't notice one way or the other when I was mapping out that Ecosystem.  I know Google has a fine-print rule against posting a Google+Local review on another review site or on your site.  But sites that feed reviews to others may have no policy against grabbing a review of your own business and putting it on your site as a testimonial.  So if you see a review you'd like to feature on your site as a testimonial, just check whether it's against the policies of the site(s) it's featured on - and if it's not, go for it!

• Google+Local reviews are still extremely important.  Not because they get fed to other sites - they don't, really - but because (a) Google is Google and because (b) Bing Local is out of the reviews game in Canada at the moment.  Recently Yelp started feeding reviews to Bing in the US, and although that's not the case in Canada, it may very well be in the future.  (Which would make Yelp reviews even more important in the long-term.)

The key takeaway is this: if you have a business in Canada, try to focus on getting reviews on YellowPages.ca, Yelp.ca, and Google+Local (and also on either TripAdvisor or HomeStars, depending on your industry).

Oh, and...

If you know of any review-sharing Canadian sites that I missed, please leave a comment! Or if you just want to leave a comment, leave a comment :)

About the Guy Who Wrote This

Phil Rozek is the CEO of the one-person company known as LocalVisibilitySystem.com.  He's also the bookkeeper, IT guy, and coffee boy.  Phil's #1 job is to get his clients visible in the local search results, but occasionally his grumpy boss makes him come in on nights and weekends to blog.

 

 

Local search is a quickly evolving game and there are more and more great resources available to those of us focusing on it. The goal of compiling this list is to help some veterans find a new tool they may have missed or give newbies a starting point to some of the best local search resources available today. Please share additional tools, blogs, resources, etc. that are exclusive to local search in the comments below!

 

The Mothership:

Local Search Ranking Factors - The first and most important resource anyone needs to read about local search is David Mihm's compilation of industry experts' feedback on local search ranking factors. Read it, study it, use it!

 

Local Search Legends/Blogs:

• Mihmorandum by David Mihm
• Local SEO Guide by Andrew Shotland
• Understanding Google Maps & Local Search by Mike Blumenthal
• Small Business Search Marketing by Matt McGee
• NiftyMarketing by Mike Ramsey
• NGS Marketing by Nyagoslav Zhekov (suggested by Darren Shaw)
• Local Visibility System by Phil Rhozek (suggested by Darren Shaw)
• Local Catalyst eMarketing by Linda Buquet (suggested by Darren Shaw)
• Nodal Bits by Chris Silversmith (suggested by Phil Rozek)
• Screenwerk by Greg Sterling (suggested by Darren Shaw)
• Nightlite Media by Adam Steele (suggested by Darren Shaw)
• Small Business Online Coach by Matthew Hunt (suggested by Darren Shaw)

 

Local Search Tools:

• Local Citation Finder - You can't blog on Whitespark's blog and leave out their Local Citation Finder, right? Honestly though, this is one of the most useful local search tools available today. We all know citations are a huge ranking factor - here's the best way to find some citation opportunities.
• GetListed.org - With GetListed.org, you can very quickly get a feel for where you're listed, where you aren't listed and how you can improve your listings. It's a great start for a business owner or consultant.
• Mike Blumenthal's Category Tool - Helps you pick the right categories for your Google+ Local page. Essential! (suggested by Darren Shaw)
• Geositemap Generator - This tool does 3-in-1: create a geositemap, KML file AND the schema markup for local businesses. There are other similar tools out there but this one does it all and keeps it simple. If there are others you like, drop a link in the comments.
• Yext - Yext allows you to submit to and edit your listings on 30 key citation sources. It's a great service for a quick NAP cleanup job. (suggested by Darren Shaw)
• Local Search Toolkit - This tool pulls in data for a given keyword to help you speed up your analysis and compare # of reviews, owner verified status and other factors. Guessing it's broken since the release of Google+ Local...
• Local Keyword Research Tool - This tool will help you generate ideas for keywords/search terms that you want your website to rank for. Enter one Geographical Modifier/Core Term per line and click Generate Keywords. (suggested by Darren Shaw)
• Bright Local - Bright Local's local search tools have a variety of free and paid tools. One of their free tools I love is the ReviewBiz tool which provides you a widget to place on your site, making it easy for your customers to leave you reviews on a variety of review sources.
• SweetIQ - Formerly named GetMeListed, SweetIQ provides an all-in-one platform for competitive analysis, rank tracking, citation research, review monitoring, and keyword research. (suggested by Darren Shaw)

 

Conferences & Training:

• BIA/Kelsey Conferences - ILM, Search Starts Here and others.
• SMX Advanced Local University - Content by GetListed.org Team
• GetListed.org University - Traveling seminar-style training, coming soon to your city!

 

Listings You Should Own & Maintain:

The sites below are big from a local search ranking perspective but they are sites that potential customers also use to find new businesses. Claim, optimize and keep your listing up to date on these sites. (Prepare for a flood of Yellow Page sales calls if you sign up on all of these - everything from directory advertising to phone book advertising to call tracking. You've been warned.)

• Google Places
• Bing Business Portal
• Yahoo! Local
• Local.com
• Yelp.com
• Super Pages
• Yellow Pages
• Dex Online
• ASK Listing
• City Search
• White Pages
• Foursquare
• Facebook

 

Data Aggregators You Should Submit to:

Many yellow page directories and niche directories use data from one of these 3 sources to build out their sites. Make sure your business data is accurate and up to date with the following aggregators.

• Localeze
• InfoUSA
• Acxiom

Milkmen.com has great write ups on how to submit to Localeze, InfoUSA and Acxiom.

 

Local Search Groups/Organizations

• Local Search Association
• BIA/Kelsey
• Linkedin Groups - Local Search
• Linkedin Groups - Yellow Pages

 

What are your favorite local search tools, blogs and other resources? Please share yours in the comments. We'll continue to update this post as resources come in!

 

About the Author:
Bryan Phelps is Director of SEO for SEO.com, specializing in local SEO services. SEO.com provides organic search services for a wide variety of businesses including large enterprises and small to medium sized businesses.

 

Image Credit: Scott Dodge

The culture of your locality provides endless opportunities for local attention. And attention means links, press mentions, and ultimately, targeted customers. As internet marketers, engaging with our local culture provides us with a great opportunity to build relationships, and ultimately, links. Citations and links are great from Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) sites, but as we all know, they don't seem to drive much traffic. We can do better.

 

Why Local?

We keep seeing algorithm updates focused on devaluing links that simply aren't relevant. A key benefit of local linkbuilding is that these links are almost entirely relevant. By learning the four functions of local link building, as well as eight tactics for executing a local linkbuilding strategy, you'll be armed with a solid method of sourcing relevant links by doing good things for your community.

 

The Four Functions of Local Link Building

1) Driving Relevant, Targeted Traffic

If your client is a small business with a brick and mortar shop in Minneapolis, their customers are probably in Minneapolis. Why not target your link building efforts locally? If your client is a restaurant, why wouldn't you want them to get written up in as many locally-focused publications as possible?

2) Building Strong Links from Authoritative Domains

If these local publications are writing about you, and you have a website, it's only natural that they'd link to you. And, as we all know, some of the strongest domains out there are local newspapers and publications, as they traditionally develop continually awesome content. I'm all for optimizing these press mentions, as squeezing every drop of value out of these links is traditionally something that is rarely thought of by the business owner.

3) Building Relationships with Authoritative Local Sources

When you get written up in an authoritative local source, you've probably made a great relationship with the author, and better yet, their organization. Relationship building tends to have exponential results, as you never know who that author is connected to. Many others have mentioned the topic of relationship building as an effective link building tactic, and this is no different.

4) Stimulating A Hyperlocal Economy

We all know that keeping your money in the local economy is bound to stimulate said economy. I think we're going to be seeing a strong resurgence in the small business, if we haven't yet already. Without getting too political, I'm of the mind that small businesses are the backbone of our economy. As people get fed up with the way that the giants of the world do business, they're going to start voting with their dollars.

When you allow small businesses to compete with these titans of industry by absolutely dominating the SERPs, you're bound to drive more customers (and therefore dollars) to that business.

Knowing this, how do you source this attention?

There are quite a few tactics that are very effective and worthwhile. Please note that the by nature, these tactics are resource intensive - they require you to build relationships, talk with people, and in some cases, change the way you do business. If you're looking for a quick win, look elsewhere - there's no shortage of offerings in that realm.

 

8 Local Linkbuilding Tactics

I'd like to preface these tactics with a mention of the Citation Labs Link Prospector tool, which offers a ton of functionality for scaling your link prospecting activities. Rather than doing all of this manually, you can create a custom report and build search queries based on the prospecting tips listed below. You are then able to export your report as a .csv, allowing you to efficiently slice and dice through the data.

Read my review of the tool here.

1) Building Links with Awesome Photography

Image Credit - Threyda

Do a quick search for Minneapolis Pictures. There's no shortage of strong domains with pictures of the city. Why don't you start taking pictures in your neighborhood, or around town, and submit them to these sources? Many of them provide back links to the source, or even the ability to publish an image from your website on their domain. Optimize the alt text, and boom, you've got a link with targeted anchor text.Image Credit - Threyda

Want to kick things up a notch? Find big local events, and take a bunch of pictures of said event. Contact someone on the administrative side of the event, and ask if you can provide a few pictures, with a link back to your site for more of your images from the event. The great thing here is that you don't even need to worry about anchor text - just a generic URL or business name as anchor text will do wonders.

Bonus points if you submit images to sites like Pinterest, or other social sources to effectively build second-tier links to boost the value (and potential targeted traffic) of your link.

Are you terrible at photography? Turn to Flickr, and search for local photographers that have taken similar pictures of events. Barter with them, ask nicely, or offer them financial compensation for letting you use their images. Or, better yet, just hire a local photographer.

Prospecting tip: Do a Google search for [locale (pictures | photos)], or (pictures of) [your city/neighborhood/town/metro area]. To find events, search for [locale (events | calendar | (season) guide)]

2) Building Links by Making Something Awesome for your Community

Image Credit - OpenLibrary.org

Develop a piece of content, an infographic, hell - even a mobile app that is purely catered to something in your community. Host the content on your site, and promote the crap out of it by pitching it to the local press.

The key here is to make something that's truly awesome. Is your locality legendary for their annual chili festival? Are you the most bike-friendly city in the nation? Do you produce the most amount of flour in the world?

Find out what makes your locale different, and more importantly, something that invokes emotion. People love reading about things that they are the best at. Conversely, taking a hilarious spin on something that they are the worst at can be an effective angle.

To get your brain working, think about how an entire media empire was founded on the fact that Minnesotans talk funny.

Prospecting tip: If you're unfamiliar with what distinguishes your target locale, try these queries: [locale visitor information], [locale quirks], [locale culture], [locale things to do], [locale accents], and the like.

3) Building Links by Featuring Others in your Community

Credit: Minnesota Business

People, businesses, and organizations love to be flattered, mentioned, and talked about. Use this to your advantage, and consider doing a piece of content surrounding those in your community doing something awesome. Ideally, you want to focus on something that is flexible and can be easily shared throughout various sources. You also want to target those that can promote this content themselves.

For example, you could throw together a blog post about top local reporters in your area that are truly making a difference. Or, cover individuals, businesses or organizations that are changing the way your city does something. Preferably, focus your efforts on something everyone loves. Or, if your angle is being controversial, do something everyone hates.

The key here is to develop a piece of content that attracts not only links, but additional write-ups about your content. I once wrote a post like this, and I attracted a handful of .edu links, as people that I happened to write about were alumni of universities that did a piece on them. You just never know with this stuff.

Prospecting tip: try these queries to find pockets of local opportunity - [locale college alumni], [locale press association], [locale bloggers], [locale sports teams], [best companies to work for in locale], [locale entrepreneurs], [locale nonprofits], [locale intitle:"for media"], [locale intitle:"of the year"], [locale intitle:"contact us"], [locale intitle:"press releases"]

4) Building Links with Travel Guides

Credit: NorthShoreVisitor

Check out the Northeast Minneapolis page on WikiTravel - yet another strong, relevant domain. There's a strong focus on interesting local businesses on this page. Of course, this is only applicable to businesses that travelers would be interested in.

All of the businesses that are listed have links back to their respective websites. You'll see that these are nofollow, and if that alone stops you, then start reading up about diversifying link types, and more importantly, marketing.

Wikitravel sites are completely user-edited, so develop a relevant tagline, and build a strong link and a citation. Beware, if you try to game the system here, you'll probably be banned rather quickly.

Prospecting tip: do a Google search for [locale (travel guide | visitors guide | tour guide)].

5) Building Links with Neighborhood Sites

There's no shortage of neighborhood business associations, as I'm sure you're aware. If you're in a sizable locale, it should be pretty easy to find one in your neighborhood.

Take my neighborhood for example - Northeast Minneapolis. This site covers news, events, businesses, and the like. They have a business directory for members, with followed links. Membership isn't the cheapest thing in the world, so if budget is a strong concern, you'll have to think creatively here.

Their last news piece was published in November of 2011 - six months ago at the time of this writing. Pitch a post, a neighborhood infographic, pictures of an event, or host something at your location. Generally speaking, talk with the person that runs it, and see what would be valuable to them - build those relationships. Again, a link to your site, in this case, would be absolutely relevant.

Prospecting tip: do a Google search for [neighborhood (association | website | organization)]

6) Building Links with "Local Scene" Sites

Credit - MPLSBikeLove.com

This will be totally dependent on your locale, but for simplicity's sake, let's say your client is a restaurant. There's no shortage of sites in this niche that cater to exactly this. In about three seconds, I came up with Heavy Table, a food section in a local publication, and mspfoodies.com. These are all sites that are devoted to the food scene in my area.

Contact them, and invite them to review your restaurant. Offer a deal for their readers. Develop a neighborhood offering - like Northeast Muffins, and let them know that you're offering this novel menu item.

Prospecing tip: try these queries to find local culture sites - [locale music blog], [locale food blog], [locale downtown blog], [locale indie blog], [locale sports blog]

7) Building Links with Daily Deals Sites

Since Groupon revamped the way we find deals, there have been no shortage of daily deals sites popping up. Now, we can debate the effectiveness of these daily deals campaigns all day long, but there are tons that are dedicated to local areas.

Find a daily deals site that is run by a local newspaper to maximize the value of your link. For example, steals.startribune.com is a fantastically strong domain. Additionally, by working with a local newspaper, you'll be building contacts and relationships.

After your daily deal is over, pitch an article to the paper about how great their daily deals campaign was for your business.

Prospecting tip: do a Google search for [locale] (daily deals | coupons | discounts)].

8) Building Links with Patch.com and IYP Sites

A seemingly little-known fact is that Patch.com offers followed links from a really strong domain. Additionally, these sites are generally very high traffic, and accept articles from just about anyone. If you're lazy, just get listed in their business directory - you'll get a strong citation, and a followed link.

If you want to kick things up a notch, develop some content for your local Patch. You can even become a neighborhood editor, and kick out a ton of content.

Additionally, a good deal of Internet Yellow Pages sites offer followed links - such as Hotfrog and Kudzu.

One of the best tools for finding IYP sites is the fantastic Local Citation Finder by Whitespark. Simply list your business, and build your link.

 

4 Tools for Tracking the Success of Your Initiatives

The fine folks at Thunder SEO wrote a killer post on this topic - 6 Ways To Track Your Linkbait Success. Rather the repeating everything they said, I'll give a general overview of my recommendations on effectively tracking the success of your link building initiatives.

1) Linkstant

Linkstant is a killer tool that automatically notifies you when someone clicks through a link to your site. It's really simple to set up, and it will send you email and/or text messages when you get new links. The real-time nature of this tool allows you to move quickly once a link has been established. Setup is really simple: all you have to do is add a few snippets of code to your pages.

2) Topsy Alerts

Topsy is a fantastic tool that shows social media analytics. Set up an alert to be emailed when someone shares a link to your site over social media, or writes an article about you. Set up two alerts - one for the title of your content, and one for the URL.

3) Google Alerts

Google Alerts are similar to Topsy alerts, and you'll want to set up an alert for the title of your content. Again, you'll be emailed an alert when someone mentions your business.

4) Link Monitoring Tools

I also like to use a blend of ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, and Google Analytics. For ahrefs, you can view Yahoo Site Explorer-esque reports on recent links to your site.

Open Site Explorer moves a bit more slowly, so check up on it when they update the index. Pro tip - SEOmoz runs a calendar to show all of their planned index updates - so add these to your personal calendar so you know when to look.

For Google Analytics, keep a close eye on your referrers in the Traffic Sources pane.

Other Great Local Link Building Resources

Here's a few other resources that are very helpful when it comes to building local links:

35 Local Link Opportunities You Missed - SEER Interactive
44 Local Link Building Queries for Citation Prospecting and Opportunity Analysis - Ontolo
Local Link Building Strategies - Linkbuildr
Using Location Data for Local Content Creation - Slide Deck from Ian Howells

 

Conclusion

In closing, local link building is an effective tactic that doesn't seem to be mentioned often. Perhaps it is too resource-intensive for some, or perhaps the nature of many agencies simply don't allow for the level of interaction that these tactics require. However, you should know that the value of these links can be incredibly strong, and that they all appear to be completely natural, contextual, and relevant in the eyes of Googlebot and users alike.

When you contribute to your local culture, you're not only putting yourself in a good position to build quality links and citations - you're building your brand in the eyes of your target market.

We all know where link building is going, and we all know when we're spending time on a tactic that is easily tracked and could be completely written out of the algorithm in the future. It's time to think local.

 

Who Am I?

Hi, I'm Scott Dodge, and I'm addicted to local search. I have a strong passion for local businesses, and I love to see them embrace internet marketing to its fullest potential.

If you'd like any ideas on how to kick your (or your client's) local presence up a notch, I'd be happy to consult with you. Find me on Twitter, Google+, or drop me an email at scott [at] scott [hyphen] dodge [dot] com - I'd love to hear from you.

 

Google rolled out a new and improved forum for Places. That would be great and everything, but they decided to completely remove the old forum rather than migrate the old posts to the new system. This is a huge loss to the local SEO community. That forum is full of years of valuable information on Google Places. It's a shame that Google didn't preserve it.

Fortunately, Mike Blumenthal tried to make a copy of it before it disappeared forever. He wasn't able to get everything, but he did salvage a large portion of it. Three cheers for Professor Maps! :)

Here's a link to the Archived Old Google Places Forum.

You can read Mike's post about this mess on his blog, here.

 

 

 

You may have seen the show Pimp My Ride, where they'd take a beat-up old car and turn it into a sleek, smooth-running street beast. But they wouldn't stop there. The custom-body shop might put a spoiler and monster-truck wheels on a sedan...or install a pool table in the back of a pickup...or put a giant fish tank in the back seat. Turning the ordinary into the overblown...AKA "pimping it out."

Your Google Places business listing may never be quite as wild as your dream car. But you can take your ho-hum Places page and make it not only better-performing, but also flashier than anything else on your block. You can pimp it out. By doing so, not only can you get your business more visible in Google Places, but you can also make it eye-poppingly flashy and more attention-worthy in the eyes of any potential customers who visit your page.

In no particular order...

here are 16 ways you can pimp your Places page:

1. Get your Google Places page to 100% completeness, before you do anything else. Your Places page isn't exactly "pimped-out" if Google itself is telling you you're missing some of the basics. (If you're not sure how to get to 100%, this pie chart will help.)

2. Make sure you get at least 5 Google reviews from your customers, so that your average customer-review rating shows up on your Places page and on the SERPs.

 

3. Get DOUBLE sets of average-review stars. You can do this by adding at least one customer testimonial to your website in what's called hReview microformat. Basically, hReview is a type of code you can use to tell Google "Hey, this is a testimonial from one of my customers...pay attention to it!" Having just one set of golden stars show up in the search results can boost your click-through rate; having two sets of can drive even more clicks from potential customers. See this excellent post by Linda Buquet for more on how to do this.

 

4. Upload as many photos as you humanly can to major third-party sites, particularly CitySearch, InsiderPages, and Thumbtack. You personally can only upload 10 photos to your Places page, but it's possible to have more than 10 show up on your Places page. How? Google pays attention to the info that third-party sites have on your business. If you can supply those third-party sources with plenty of photos, Google often will grab those photos and put them on your Places page (in addition to the 10 photos you personally can upload directly to your Places page. Upload photos as many different sites as you can (it's OK to reuse some of the same photos from site to site). By the way, you may be able to "feed" extra photos to Google by having a "Gallery" page on your website.

Bonus tip: before uploading, use GeoSetter to geo-tag them with the lat and long of the business, and add NAP and keywords to the meta data.

5. Add a "post" to your Places page that includes a link to a particularly cool page, photo gallery, special offer, or newsletter sign-up area on your website. One of the most basic purposes of your Places page is to get people to check out your site. It's easy to forget about the humble "post" feature-most business owners never even learn of it-but it's worth using if there's a specific area of your site you'd really like potential customers to see.

6. Reply to every customer review written on your Places page. Fine, maybe you don't have reply to every one, but you should get in the habit of thanking the customers who leave you nice reviews, and graciously responding to the few who don't. Most importantly, this looks good to potential customers. It's also good way to fill out the reviews area of your page a little more, and to slip in occasional tidbits about your services that maybe you didn't have a way to mention anywhere else on your page. See this great post from Andrew Shotland on how best to respond to negative reviews.

 

7. Get "Best Ever" reviews. These little badges make for nice "bling" on your Places page. Plus, they automatically count as 5-star reviews. Your customers need to go to places.google.com/rate and search for your business by name in order to leave you "Best Ever" reviews.

 

8. Turn a couple of customer testimonials into photos, and upload the photos to your Places page. I've never actually seen this done (though I'm sure someone's done it). This is useful if a great customer wrote you a shining testimonial (in an email, in a letter, on a grain of rice...whatever) that you'd like potential customers to see, but you never asked that person to post a review for you. (If you're interested, I discuss this technique more in this post.)

9. Get as many customer reviews as you can on 3 or 4 third-party sites. At the bottom of your Places page, Google features up to 3 links that go to third-party sites where customers have written you reviews. Up to 4 of these links also show up in your "preview" area, which customers see when they hover their cursors over your Places listing from the main search results page.

 

10. If possible, ask your most loyal customers - or bestest friends ;) - to upload photos to your Places page through their Google accounts. These will show up as "From a Google user." This is another approach to getting more than 10 photos on your Places page (which is the maximum number that you can upload personally). This can help potential customers realize "Hey, these people actually have customers who give a rip...they might be OK. Maybe I'll give them a buzz."

11. Add a caption to the first photo you upload. You'll want to pick this photo-and its caption-carefully because everyone who's on your Places page will see it. Unlike Bing, Google Places doesn't have a way to add captions to photos, so you'll have to save the caption as part of the image itself, and then upload the photo to your places page.

12. Add several different "Offers"-AKA coupons-to your Places page. You could absolutely go crazy with offers and add tons of them, if you wanted to: I once added 10 to my listing, just to see if I could. I'm sure I could have added many more if my trusty mouse finger didn't give out. As long as you comply with Google's guidelines, you can add a bunch of coupons to your listing (as long as they're semi-decent offers, and as long as you don't have so many that it just looks weird to potential customers).

13. Add photos to your "Offers." However many of them you have on your page, they'll be a little more noticeable and enticing if they're not just blobs of text.

14. Get enough reviews that the "At a glance" snippets appear on your Places page. I've yet to discover exactly how many reviews you need in order for "At a glance" snippets to appear on your page, but I do know these snippets are extracted from some combination of your Google reviews, reviews written on third-party sites, and other info on third-party sites (like business descriptions). If you're more or less diligent about citation-building and asking customers for reviews, you'll almost certainly get good "At a glance" snippets.

15. Upload a photo of a QR code to your Places page. Even these days, not everyone has a smartphone, so not everyone can scan QR codes, but many people just LOVE scanning them. QR codes are like catnip for some people. You can have the QR code take them to a page of your website, another website-pretty much anything. It doesn't really matter: the idea here is to boost engagement and make your Places page a little flashier.

16. See if you can snag an award, like "Best of CitySearch" or the "Angie's List Super Service Award," from third-party review sites. These often show up on your Places page-and look mighty nice if you can get them. Whether or not you can even find such awards largely depends on your industry: even if you're the best glass-blower or cape-maker in your time zone, there may not be an award that you can get displayed on your Places page.

About the Dude Who Wrote This

Phil Rozek runs LocalVisibilitySystem.com, a go-to resource for business owners who want more visibility to local customers. In particular, Phil's mission is to help businesses get visible in Google Places. Phil is so serious about this that next to his laptop is an IV-drip filled with Red Bull, which powers him through each and every blog post.

 

When you're running an Adwords campaign for a small, local-focused business, every dollar counts. You typically don't have much to spend, so it's critical to focus your spend on the people most likely to become customers.

Using negative keywords helps you zero in on actual customers and stop wasting money on anyone who isn't a good prospect for your business. When you add a keyword to the negative keyword list, your ad won't show if that keyword is in a person's search query.

How to add negative keywords to your local Adwords campaign

Adding negative keywords to your Adwords campaign is easy. You can do it one of two ways:

1) Simply add the keywords under the Keywords tab in the same place you add your regular keywords. To designate a negative keyword, simply add a negative sign (-) in front of it.

2) If you want to get more advanced, scroll to the bottom of the Keywords page of your Adwords campaign and expand the Negative keywords option. From here you can manage negative keywords on the ad group level or campaign level, as well as build out negative keyword lists that you can apply across different campaigns.

So what negative keywords should local Adwords campaigns use?

Employment searches - Job seekers in your industry can and will waste a huge chunk of your Adwords budget if you're not careful. This is especially true for professional services like accountants and dentists. Assuming you're trying to attract clients and not job applicants, you should load up on negative keywords like:

-career
-careers
-job
-jobs
-work
-employment
-employer
-salary
-salaries
-pay
-hire
-hiring
-intern
-recruiter
-recruiters
-resume

General information searches - When people perform general information searches, they're usually at the beginning of the buying cycle.

By eliminating these searches, you are able to focus your spend on people further along in the cycle. That means they are far more likely to convert into leads or customers. To stop your ad from showing when people perform general information searches, use negative keywords like:

-what is
-articles
-what are
-how to
-pictures
-photos
-review
-reviews

Training and education searches - People looking to learn things about your industry aren't typically good targets, unless you specifically supply education or training. Stop your ads from running on education and training searches like:

-training
-class
-classes
-course
-courses
-book
-books
-textbook
-school
-schools
-college
-university

Searches for areas you don't serve - For locally-focused businesses, there is no point to show your ad to people outside your service area. There are a variety of ways people will search for local businesses that you should be aware of when picking negative match keywords related to areas.

• Suburb - Searches by suburb are popular in mid and large-sized cities. Depending on your city and your industry, people may not be willing to travel far to do business with you. If that is the case, use suburbs outside your market as negative keywords.
• City - Add the names of cities you don't serve that people in your area may be searching for. For example, an Edmonton-based dry cleaner would want to add Calgary and Red Deer as negative keywords to filter out people in Edmonton looking for dry cleaning services in those cities.
• Zip code - Searches that include a zip code are common in local business searches in the USA - "lawyer in 90011" for example. As a local business, you may want to use zip codes of areas outside target market as negative keywords.
• Abbreviations - Don't forget to add the common abbreviations of areas outside your target market. These include two letter state (GA, NY, NV, etc.) or city (LA, SF, TO, etc.) abbreviations.

The usual suspects - These are the negative keywords almost every Adwords campaign should have. These are the keywords that will be a waste of money for almost any type of campaign.

-free
-craigslist
-ebay
-kijiji
-lyrics
-youtube
-sex
-nude
-porn
-torrent

Find even more negative keywords

Once you've launched your Adwords campaign, be sure to continually add negative keywords to your Adwords campaign. To find irrelevant keywords that are triggering your ads, click the "see search terms" drop-down on the Keywords page.  

This will give you a list of the actual keywords that users are searching that triggered your ads. When you see an irrelevant keyword in this report, add it to your negative keyword list.

Negative keywords are a great way for small and local businesses to get a higher ROI from Adwords. Stop wasting your money on Adwords, start using negative keywords.

This is a guest post from Andrew Breen, who runs Outshine Online Marketing, a Halifax online marketing company with a global client base. You can follow him on Twitter @breenandrew.