Look to Local Search Listings to Win New Business

Optimizing your marketing for local visibility is is a multi-faceted affair. It requires both actively raising awareness of who you are and what you do, while also maintaining the static sites, business listings and social media that help customers to find your services when they have an immediate need.

The first part is much more attractive to most owners than the last, but no business can afford to forget about local listings and how they work to bring in new customers.

Examining your local online links is as well as where you need to up your local search game. Today we'll try to help you out on that front, with resources (like custom and vanity phone numbers) that are worth a lot but cost very little.

Watch Webmaster Tools

Most business owners root around Google Analytics for online metrics, and rightly so. But far fewer examine the wealth of info packed into Google's other offering (and Bing's, if you have time to monitor it), which is their Webmaster Tools.This overlooks some vital data that can help to dissect how customers find your business and when locals link to you.

Sign up for these services as soon as you can, then look at the following sections to inform your local SEO work:

• 'Links to Your Site' - Check out those linking to your website and the most popular pages and content you publish.
• 'Content Keywords' - Find search terms that help people get to your site, as well as how they describe what you do.
• 'Search Queries' - See how often your business website crops up in search results and the clicks through that result from these impressions.

With this data fresh in your spreadsheets, you can work on improving the areas that most affect your local search results.

Examine Citations & Site Links

Incoming links from other sites is a well-known as an important factor used to establish thew search authority of your site. Local citations play a significant part in establishing this authority as well, meaning you'll need to know what they are and where you can build them.

Working on both side of local SEO elements once or twice a week will ensure that your business develops a steady stream of customers finding your information via online channels. A little effort up front is well worth the continuous flow of inquiries that take much less time to generate than cold calls or expensive advertising.

By using Webmaster Tools in the ways we describe, you'll be able to find who else is linking to you and what search terms people are using. You can use this information to build relationships with businesses and potential customers in your area. It also helps you to work more effectively with the keywords you use to describe your business in citations. Start finding these by using a tool like Whitespark's Local Citation Finder.

To take things a step further, consider exploring the link structure of your competitors. Using a tool like Open Site Explorer, you can begin to learn who links to competing sites and decide whether there's a good case for them to also link to you.

If you're just starting out, remember that the domain name you choose will heavily influence the links you receive. The easier it is to remember and the shorter it is to input, the more likely that others will be to recall and recommend your site.

A number of factors work in to making your business more visible and helping local customers discover your business. The more of these that you can work on regularly- and the more information you have to guide that work - the more your site will be found by the kind of customers you want to attract.

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When your customers find your listing, make it easier for them to remember to call by offering a local vanity number. Start your search here if you don't already have this memorable marketing tool.