Local search, well, it’s just different than regular search optimization. The signals are different, for one. Reviews are key, and local search engines are absolutely critical.
In the US, these sources are well known. Yahoo and Bing Local, Angie’s List, Yelp, Localeze, Judy’s Book and Dex are among the top sources for local influence.
In Canada, it’s a very different story. None of the above accept submissions from Canadian companies.
For Canadian companies, the options are there – but they’re not as obvious. For an example, let’s look at our friends over at Big Green Storage.
Big Green Storage is a small self-storage facility located in my home town of Nanaimo, BC. Like many small businesses, the owner – John – is busy running his business and wearing the half-dozen hats that small entrepreneurs wear.
The goal of setting something up for John is to rank, first and foremost, for the business name. I can’t say how important it is to have ownership of your content – when you have ownership, you have control of the user experience when people land on your site.
The first steps were a domain, hosting and a small, modest website. Those done, we needed to get some links going.
I won’t list all the sites I submit to (I don’t want to give it all away), but they include a mix of fast-acceptance and high crawl frequency (like Craigslist and Kijiji) with longer term, high authority (Google Places and Yelp). The fast acceptance is so the site gets crawled and indexed quickly, the high authority is to build ranks.
For icing on the cake, this post on my blog serves both me and my client well. I get to write about local search marketing, my client gets a contextual link from a decent source – one which I know will help his site get indexed.
It’s a shame that the sites said to have the most influence don’t have a great global presence, but it’s not unusual and, if you’re Canadian, it’s something you’ll have to get used to. The upside is that the sources are harder to find, so it’s easier to get an edge over the competition.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on October 24, 2011 at 1:34 pm, filed under Link Building, Search Engine Optimization. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.