While doing a Webinar for Expert WordPress customers this past Monday I received several questions and it downed on me – I never shared these simple strategies I personally use to ensure that your Globally Accessible site or blog is set for Local Search results.

Fact of the matter is – All Major Search Engines invested heavily in last couple of years into providing relevant LOCAL results to searchers. And while it might not matter to you if your blog covers a niche that has global relevance – it is EXTREMELY important to business owners who use blog to generate leads for their local business!

In this post I will go through the steps you need to complete to become visible! EWP customers will also get a video tutorial at a later point…

While I understand that there are multiple search engines available – I really don’t care and in this post will concentrate on main 3 responcible for sending me traffic.

Getting Your Blog Into Google Local Search

Google is the biggest player and one that I personally concentrate on because it delivers most results for me. Beauty part here is that you don’t need to work too had to ensure your blog shows up highly visible at the top of First Page, when someone uses your keywords to perform local search.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s assume you have a blog to get leads on topic of “cat care” in a remote town of Norfolk (yeah, am being sarcastic here). When someone does a search on “cat care” in Google – they will be presented with regular search results and assuming that key phrase is your main one – you are competing with 21.800.000 other pages that have that key phrase:

Not very good odds – right? But look what happens when someone does same search but also provides a specific location – YOURS:

You are now competing with a LOT smaller group of listings that belong to local businesses, some of which don’t even have a site and the only question you should be asking yourself at this point – HOW DO I BEAT THEM?

So, now we are talking!

• First you need to be absolutely sure you pick the right keywords to represent your business and I’m not going to cover it in this post, as it is a whole new tutorial on its own.
• Next you need to register with Google Local to ensure your business will be presented in relevant local results which are determined by YOUR registered location – address.

Registration is simple – go to Google Local Business Center and Add New Business. On the very first screen of the registration you will be provided with a form to input address of your business – this is what will determine your LOCAL SEARCH RESULTS RELEVANCE and also used for verification process, so be sure that address is correct and actually exists! They will send you a post card to that address for verification purposes.

I’m not going to describe the entire process here – it is fairly self explanatory and you should be able to complete it in few minutes. Along with verification it will take about 2-3 weeks before your blog will become part of local search results.

Getting Local With Yahoo

Getting into Yahoo is not as obvious as with Google and while also require verification – can be done right here – Yahoo Local.

Just go through the steps of the process and since it has been a while since I used it – I can’t give any more specific advise. What I can tell you is that LOCAL relevance in every search engine determined by your address – so be sure you provide correct one.

Getting Into Microsoft Live Search

I personally don’t use Live Search but I guess some people do as I see traffic from that engine on some of my niche blogs.

Since submitting your business to Live search doesn’t cost you anything except time – I recommend you also complete submission to it using options provided in Live Search Local Listings Center. They will also require verification and if my memory serves me right – will mail it to you via postcard, just like Google.

Once your submissions completed and assuming your blog is optimized for regular search – you should do well in comparative to majority of your competition, because the truth is – 99.9% have no clue how to do what I described above and don’t even have a website. What even more disturbing – out of many already listed local businesses – a lot of them don’t have a live site!

Opportunity is ripe for you – so go grab YOUR UNFAIR SHARE of local traffic!

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