More Simple Ways to Boost Your Local Search Engine Rank

In a follow up to my post about helping local customers find your business online, here are a few more tips to help your local customers find you online.

Content: In order to get people to your site, you need content on your site that matches what the person is searching for, whether it's on your homepage, your about page, a blog, or any other internal page. For example, let's assume you're an Orlando, Fl area Italian restaurant. if you want to show up on Google for "orlando italian restaurant" and "italian restaurant in orlando", you'll need content that has those phrases in it. Additionally, you'll want that content to read naturally so that it doesn't throw up any red flags for Google (so don't just make a page that says "italian restaurant, italian food, orlando italian restaurant, orlando italian food, orlando restaurant, orlando food").

More about building incoming links: As I mentioned in the previous entry, if you can build relationships with other local businesses and get them to link back to you, Google sees that as a vote of confidence. You need these links to be contextually significant - in other words, not just a static list of links to businesses, but a link that incorporates keywords related to your business (even better if it can be in a paragraph about your business!) Using our example of the Orlando, FL Italian restaurant, in order to get the best out of that relationship, you'll want them to link to your site using variances of phrases similar to "orlando italian restaurant", because that means that site is "voting" for your Italian restaurant to show up in the search engine results when someone searches for those phrases.

Optimize on your business name: In your incoming link strategy, your SEO strategy, your content strategy, and any PPC campaigns you run, don't be afraid to optimize on your business name. After all, you want people to find YOUR business when they type your business name into Google!

Make sure you've been submitted to search engines: You can submit your site to Google, if you haven't already done it, here: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Blogging: Keeping a page that's frequently updated is really important in terms of SEO. Having a blog or articles on your site is a great way to keep the content fresh and keep your site near the top of the search engine results page. Also, submitting these articles to local news sites, bloggers, or social networks, or other local businesses, in hopes that they'll review/link to/publish them is a great way to continue to boost your search engine rank.

If you need help getting ideas for keywords and keyword phrases to integrate into your content, Google can help you out with that. You can go to: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You can enter a keyword to get suggestions based on that, and you can also have the tool analyze your website for keywords based on the content you already have.