Step 1 – Basic Market and Keyword Research

The first step to optimizing your local listings is discovering your targeted keywords.  This process will give you insight to your marketplace and your competition as well as uncover very laser targeted keywords to your business

Get a handle on the marketplace and competition. Basic market and keyword research are key to the business description and the directory categories. I never cease to be amazed at the gap between my common sense assumptions and actual results – results will often contradict how a business has merchandized itself if they have not advertised online and researched their market.

First, some basic questions: Am I a new or established business? Do I have a website? Do I advertise online? Have I done previous market and keyword research? Do I have any useful data? Whether the answers to these questions, I do basic keyword research testing variations based on geography, to get a big picture based on search terms and number of queries.

With or without prior keyword research or experience, I like to imagine myself as an online customer of my business’s products or services (and my competitors), walking in their shoes as an online mystery shopper. What search terms or phrases (keywords) would someone enter into Google or other search engine to find your business?

I use basic keyword research tools to see the number of searches my business categories generate – nothing too sophisticated at this point.

• Google’s Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker

As a local business I add location to my keywords. For example, if I am a seafood and waterfront restaurant in Miami I will check the number of searches for ‘seafood restaurant‘ and ‘waterfront restaurant‘, then ‘Miami restaurant‘, ‘Miami seafood restaurant‘, ‘Miami waterfront restaurant‘, and ‘Miami-Dade restaurant‘. It also pays to test for zip codes, state or county combinations.

Local keyword tools: GeoMake. This freeware creates location-targeted lists combining a keyword with a state, city, county only, both cities and counties, city before keyword, etc.

Need inspiration for creative keyword research? Read Aaron Wall’s ‘Keyword Inspiration’

Based on my research I can then move on to what is the most challenging task of all – a 200 character (200 being the most common limit) business description.

The process of getting ranked well in Google can seem like a daunting task.  There is work involved there is no doubt about that but once you get a few tricks under your belt and understand some of the strategies it becomes less of a monster.  Here is a great interview about some of those strategies directly from Gooooogle so you know it must be true. 

Claiming Your Google Local Listing

Matt McGee – Claiming is the right thing to do, but building out your profile with great information is what helps rankings.

"Claiming is the right thing to do, but building out your profile with great information is what helps rankings."
–Matt McGee

Tom Crandall – Claiming or creating listing(s) in Google Places does two things. First, it tells the search engines that they have the most accurate and up-to-date information about a business location. Second, it gives the business owner an opportunity to out-rank competitors by optimizing their business listing for targeted keyword sets and geographic areas.

Mary Bowling – One of the most important factors in ranking, although unclaimed listings can and do rank well due to other factors. In addition, you should claim your listing so that you can control much of what searchers see about your business, rather than letting others control it.

Local Search Ranking Factors

Why Is Yelp Important?

If you own a restaurant or other type of business location, another important task to do after claiming your locations on  Google Local Business is to claim them on Yelp.  While my research is based on work in the restaurant industry, it is applicable to any business with a physical location that is visited by either retail or business customers.

Yelp is important because it is emerging as the leading consumer review site for many types of businesses and it currently receives high priority from the Google Search Engine results

Why Is Yelp Important To Your Business?

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page.

But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places. If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page.

So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5% The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

· Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

· Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’.

-  Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

· Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

· When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

· Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.