Showing up in Google’s local listings is becoming one of the hotest areas of search engine optimiztion.  A new tool GetListed.org, can help you navigate to the search engine listing sites, but just listing yourself won’t get you in the top ten.A few days ago I got contacted by a potential client who desperately wanted to get in the top ten of Google Local  for his niche.  He’s in a highly competitive market where the natural search has close to 900,000 pages and his site is typically in the top 3 of these natural listings.  When we talked I pointed out to him what a great job he had done getting there.  He didn’t waste a second telling me that he would easily trade that spot for a listing Google local.  He explained that people searching for his service in his city never bother to look beyond the top ten local listings.  His proof was that when his business was in the top ten they had several contacts a day, but once they fell out of those top 10 spots their call volume from Internet searches dried up almost completely.

This man had done everything he could think of to get into Google local.  He had over 30 reviews, he had at least a doze citation pages, he had images, coupons and pretty much all of the most commonly suggested factors in place.  By all rights he should have been showing up if the common wisdom about local search was all correct.  Heck he was even quoting me reports and citing authors who have written on showing up in local search.

Among the services that we provide at Dew Point Productions is a Google Local listing service.  If it were as easy as simply listing your service with the search engines, then everyone would be in the top-ten, but not everyone can be there.  In consulting with the client mentioned above I was able to identify five key areas that were likely keeping him short of his desired goal.  Clearly step one is getting listed, but the question has to be asked.  Then what?

A lot of people think that being in the center of town has a tremendous amount to do with it.  Some people go so far as to acquire addresses in the center of town, but think about it for a moment.  Google may know the longitude and latitude of the center of every town in the US, but are the businesses closest to that point always going to be the best results for every searcher?  I don’t think so.  More to the point, I can show you results all day that break this rule.  What about the number of reviews a business has?  These are easily faked and Google probably doesn’t overlook that.  How important are they?  Do a dozen local based searches and see how often those with no or fewer reviews out rank those listings with more.

Clearly, just like in its natural search algorithm, Google has a number of factors that contribute to your placement in Google local.  I’ve had consistent results in getting clients into this space and I can tell you for certain that what matters is not that you have filled out your listing, but rather how you’ve filled it out in combination with the content on your Website.

Getlisted.org is a great place to start, but if you haven’t shown up in the top ten in the first four weeks you need to go back and review your listing or hire someone to look at it for you.

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