When considering how to show in local search results, on that Google map where you want to be at the top, you should think about how many people are clicking your listing when they see it. That’s an essential factor. And so your landing pages need to be worthy of keeping people on your site. Remember, we’re marketing to people not to search engines.
We’re assuming your landing pages convert, and when people find you, they’re signing up or buying what you’re selling. So to show up in local search results, you’re going to need citations. Citations are outside references that reinforce who you are, what you do, and where to find you. Citations reference your location. So they would be local associations or directories that reaffirm your address and phone number.
Consider something else for a moment—the location of your web server. For example, if you’re serving customers in Los Angeles, but your server is in Washington, DC or Virginia, then that there’s going to be a latency or a lot of connections between you and them. And that’s going to slow down the performance of your website for those customers. And you may want to consider a server that’s closer so that your page loads faster. Then, when the IP address of your domain gets resolved, it has a closer location. That’s important.
One of the other things that we look at is reviews and social signals. Reviews and Social Discussions are going to tell search engines what people think of your company, which is an important factor when competing.
But social signals also tell the search engines that you’re local and that people like you and that you are actively engaging with them. So engagement is an essential factor. Consider people searching for restaurants. The popularity of a restaurant is going to determine how high up it shows in search results.
When you create your Google business page, you’re going to want to post to that page as much as you can because that’s another form of engaging with the public. When people are searching for local businesses, often there’s a sidebar in the search results with details about the company and any news or specials. The more you can keep that up to date, the better you’re going to be featured in the search results.
One other underutilized technique is press releases. Press releases tie you to a location because you’re often making an announcement that’s anchored to your physical location or something that you’re doing for the community. It’s an opportunity to share with news outlets everywhere who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing for a particular moment in time. That establishes some relevance with the search engines also as far as your local presence.
One more advanced technique that I use but don’t often share is changing photo metadata. You can change the GPS location of a photo. When you take a photo on your cellphone, it’s encoded with the location of where that photo was taken. GPS encoding is a top-secret method that the search engines use to establish relevance and originality of photos.
When you place photos on your website, search engines check the GPS data. They also check these photos on social media as a kind of backup to see if you are truly local. And so one of the best ways to rank is altering the metadata.
If you’re using other people’s photos, for example, taking stock photography, you want to mix it up a little bit. You want to change the fingerprint on the picture so that it doesn’t match 200 other websites out there that are using the same photo. Make sure you change that metadata and add that GPS code because that’s going to help establish your local presence.