Search Engine Marketing Using Local Directories

It’s always a good idea to hire a professional search engine optimization company that can get you listed on the first page of Google for local search results, but there are some things that you can do as a business owner to increase your rankings in the search engines. Local directories such as CitySearch.com, Merchant Circle, Yelp.com, Google Places and many others that perform well in local search results are a good way to obtain better search results for your company.

If you perform some local searches in Google for some of your target keywords and phrases for your industry make a note of the local directories that perform well in those results. Many times if you create an account with these directories your business listing you should already be listed in their directory and all you will need to do is to clean your listing and to verify it through their verification process and then you will be able to modify the existing business listing with pictures keywords and links to your website.

I will give you a good example of this. One of our clients (and my brother-in-law) owns a sand blasting company here in Broken Arrow Oklahoma (T & D Sandblasting). He did not have a website and he came to us wanting to know how he can appear in local search results on the first page of Google.

After doing some research to find out that his competitors did not have websites either and the majority of the listings in Google for local search results for “Broken Arrow Sandblasting” belonged to the directories, it was easy to see that all he had to do was claim his business listings with the local directories and in some cases pay a small fee to have his listings featured in those directories.

Every industry is different, and local directories will not always perform as well as they do in this case. Market saturation, the number of competitors, and search engine algorithms come into play, but regardless, your company should still be in as many local directories that you can list it in. If nothing else, the inbound links from the directories to your company’s website will help increase your search ranking with Google.

It takes time to setup the directory listings, but it is well worth it and it is something you can do from your own desk without outsourcing the work to a professional web development firm to do a little search engine marketing.