Do you remember the time that business marketers chose their business names based on the ranking in the telephone book? You’d best call your business AAA to appear on the top of the telephone list to be found as first. Well you now don’t have to add A, AAA or ABC to your business name to show up as first
– welcome to the age of internet.

Increasingly, when folks turn to a search engine, they aren’t looking for something around the world, they’re looking for something in their neighborhood. They even will be jumping in the car, going out and buying what they find online.

So here are some tips what you can do to improve your local business to be found by search engines.


Relate to your geographic surroundings
Search engines will try to come up with the best local search results. So make sure your website is related with lots of local content. Local markers like addresses, city names, suburb names, neighborhood names, zip codes, area codes, maps and directions are all markers that say your business is local. Insert these date into your pages and let websites associated with these local markers refer to your website.

Be interesting for your local readers
Provide content that is of interest for your local readers, to create content that is related to your community. Even if it is not directly related to your product or services.
For example you could cover the musical performances, festival or B2B network events of your community.
Using a little RSS magic and a bookmarking tool like Delicious, you could even automate the aggregation of news and other related content for neighborhoods with very little work.
This way you’ll  improve local search results by creating content that offers value to local readers. For local search this is the kind of information search engines value the most.