Get Traffic and Boost Your Business with Local SEO

If you have a local, offline business, you want to be well ranked in the search engine so you get local traffic. Let's take a look at a few local SEO strategies that will get your site ranking better. We are not quite done with our discussion, and if you are like us the gears would be turning with fresh ideas. There are all kinds of business models that will not make use of every promotion vehicle, and that could include List Profit Sniper since we are talking about it. There is a lot to consider when you are contemplating all new promotional activities. As it concerns us, we keep our radar up and running at all times because we do not want to miss any chance to capitalize on an opportunity. The gains you can realize by scaling what you have going on with any advertising and your marketing can make all the difference. The smart small web business owner will always have an open mind to new methods for increasing exposure.

Every industry has big names, and if you want to get the most from those local searches, you'll do your best to get listed with those names. We're talking about Google Maps and Yahoo! Local. These two happen to be the most influential in this area, which is why you should try to get listed with them first, and then get on with the other things. The reason is that if you list with these sites, the search engines and human searchers will always know where to find you and your job will be simple. It's not difficult to list yourself with Google Maps. It's just a small form, and then you have to verify that you are who you are either through telephone or email verification procedures. Once you have verified everything, you'll have to wait for four to six weeks before you can see your site in the local search listings. Similarly, coming to Yahoo! the process is the same, except that you don't need to go through the verification. Yahoo! will even allow you to design your business listing to your liking.

Another plus about going with Yahoo! is that the approval process is very fast. Whatever you do, just make sure you don't ignore this simple tip because it will take you a long way in your goal to reach out to the local audience.

When you're targeting local sites listing services such as Yahoo! Local, Bing Local and Google Places, you should first start off by logging into them and claiming your profile. If you want to claim your profile on any of these sites, there are a few steps you have to complete to verify various facts about yourself, and this includes verifying your phone number and address. This doesn't take much time but it will definitely give you an edge over the others who haven't done it. By including photos of yourself or your business on these local site listings, you enhance your reputation, as people feel more positive and trusting when they see an image. So to make sure this process goes smooth and people see good, worthy pictures, upload a few from your site. While these don't have to be professional quality photographs, you do want them to reflect well on your business, so they should be fairly good.

You should also try to get listed with all those directories that are the Yellow Pages on the web. Other good directories to begin with are SuperPages.com, YellowBook.com and YelloPages.com. YellowPages.com, for example, offers businesses free listings online and they get more than one hundred million searches every month. At the same time, SuperPages.com supplies its business listings to the bigger portals like MSN and About.com. You can have a very basic listing with them for free. In summary, local search engine optimization requires you to put in a bit of extra effort, but in the end, it also gives you the opportunity to reach out to your target audience easily.