What is local search? Local search is the process in which a business utlizes local business listings through major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!

A local listing can help your business gain exposure through location searches such as ‘location’ + ‘service’. For example, a client of mine wanted more exposure for ‘Portland electrician’, we optimized his local business listing for these key terms and within a month his phone calls went up 30%.

The best things about local search listings is that claiming them is very easy. Go to any local business center for each of the major search engines and claim your businesses there.

Congrats, you’ve gone through the first step of claiming your business! Don’t be alarmed, but there are a lot more things to do. You might want to consider listing your business at UniversalBusinessListing.org, InfoUSA.com, and Axciom (the last of which will be aided by UniversalBusinessListing.org)

These listing providers are some of the biggest data providers to major search engines and can really help your ranking in the local business center. Some free data providers that Google, Yahoo, and Bing seem to crawl more than any other are CityVoter.com, SuperPages.com, and YellowBook.com.

One of the most important things in all of local search is to keep your business information consistent through all listing directories and sites that mention your business. For example, Unleashed is listed exactly as the following:

Unleashed
819 SE Morrison ST
STE 210
Portland, OR.
97214

Keeping your address information consistent will help search engine spiders determine if your business is reliable and therefor more trustworthy than others. This will score you big points and help your overall optimization campaign!

Additional steps for local business center optimization are pretty complicated, so you might want to hire a local search engine expert to help examine more in-depth strategies.

Next week we’ll talk about how Google Earth can help you with your local business center listing!