Source: GetListed.org

I’m sitting here in the little town Burley, Idaho at the GetListed.org Local University conference (an all-day seminar about how to get listed in the local results/maps on search engines like Google).

Sitting with 100 other entrepreneurs and SEO’s and learning more about local search engine optimization is a great experience.

So, here is a small bit of what I learned or what stuck out to me:

• Nationwide, only about 20% of businesses have claimed their Google Places page.
  During his presentation, David Mihm of GetListed.org asked everybody in the room to raise their hand if they have claimed their Google Place page. And sure enough, only about 20% did. Lesson? Claim your Google Places page!!
• Phone books have been replaced by our computers and smart phones.
  Mike Ramsey of Nifty Marketing also did an unscientific survey with the audience. He asked us to raise our hands if we use our phone for finding local businesses and services. To no surprise of mine, most of the group raised their hands. This is a similar result when I asked a group of about 80 business owners to raise their hand if they use a phone book on a regular basis. Only 2 raised their hand. I think that speaks for itself.
• Ensure your domain’s WHOIS information is up to date.
  Until 5 minutes ago, I was guilty of having out-dated WHOIS information. WHOIS is basically the contact details for your website domain registration. Check out what I mean by looking at Dox Marketing’s WHOIS page. Google scans these types of pages and takes the data into consideration in their search results pages.
• Utilize an Editorial Calendar for your blog.
  Matt McGee talked about a great strategy to help ensure your blog doesn’t go dead. He suggested to create an Editorial Calendar where you can map out the topics of your blog posts for the next year. These topics can include company, industry and local events as well as “evergreen” topics such as how-to’s and answers to FAQ’s. Considering this is my first post in over a month, I should probably take his advice as well.
• Get more citations, links and reviews.
  To be ranked better in the local/map search results, you need get more citations (your business contact info on other sites), links (hyperlinks on other sites pointing to your site), and reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, Bing, etc.

I hope this helps. Keep an eye out for more great content about local search engine optimization…

~ Brodie

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Tags: local seo, search engine optimization, seo

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