As consumers increasingly turn to the web to research information prior to making a purchase, it’s becoming more important for local businesses to appear in the local search results.  Despite the increased usage of search engines as information resources, many small businesses still aren’t properly utilizing the web as an additional marketing mechanism.  Small businesses are losing sales and market share with each day/week/month that passes in which they fail to show up online.  Big companies have the advantage of multi-million dollar marketing/PR budgets and years of brand building behind them which allow them to quickly make noise in any market they enter.

One built in advantage that local businesses have over big corporations is the fact that they are indeed local.  Given similar price points and service offerings, I’d imagine most consumers would prefer to give business to a local vendor over a conglomerate.  But the point is moot if searchers are unable to find the local business in the search results as you can’t do business with a company that you don’t know exists.

How To Appear In The Local Listings

The single most important thing a local business can do to increase their visibility within the search results is to claim their local business listing within the major search engines.  In medium/low competition markets this step alone could allow you to rank for some of your targeted local keywords.  When claming your listing it’s important to ensure your business is properly categorized.  If no action is taken at this point the engines will list your business based on how other data sources (Yellow Pages for example) have categorized it.  The links below will take you to the sign up page for the local business centers of the three major search engines:

Google Local
Yahoo! Local
Live Search Local Business Center

The primary goal when optimizing for local search terms is providing the search engines with signals regarding where your business is located.  You can do this by making sure your full business address appears on at least one page of your site (likely a “Contact Us” or “About Us” page and including primary service areas within the title, description, and/or page content.

It may also help to create profiles or register with third party sites such as Citysearch, Yelp, InfoUSA, or YellowPages.com, some of which enable you to receive ratings and reviews for your business, which is another factor search engines consider when ranking local results.