Importance of Local Optimazation

Restrict your search to a particular geographic area. In early 2005, Google Local became publicly available by placing the local tab on their home page. For many search engine queries, up to three local listings appear above the #1 natural search results.

The concept of this is to show relevant local businesses (with or without websites) to people who look online for them. These listings appear either by entering business information to the Google Local Business Center, advertising with companies like CitySearch, SuperPages, DigitalCity, other local portals or to simply have a Yellow Pages listing. At the starting time, their results were average at best. They had minimal information other than where these businesses were actually located. Now their results and information have greatly improved since then. Businesses that have a local Yellow Pages listing might already be in Google's index whether they have a website or not. Although you don't need a website to be listed in Google Local, a properly optimized site can be a big plus.

Location: Location plays a big part in many different Google Local searches and it makes sense that they will continue to consider this valuable. For Ex. How about a search for Minneapolis pizza? The majority of local results are located in the Minneapolis city limits.

How to list your business on local Google
Entering your own business information:
None of these listings include information supplied directly from the business itself. This can be done for free by signing up at the Google Local Business Center. This is a way to get listed both prominently and properly. They can custom write their own descriptions, list their business hours, payments accepted, and show contact information including an email and link to their website.

Suppose you have business with multiple locations, it can certainly take a lot of time to manually enter information for each locality. Companies with ten or more locations can now send Google a Froogle business listing feed. This is something that can be remedied by submitting a business feed.

Elements of getting top rank on local Google:
1. Use of Google’s Local Business Center (LBC): Local search requires structured data to be effective. Google needs to be able to match the business to a location.

2. Availability/Trust of other business data: If the business is not participating directly with Google’s LBC, does it have listings in the other major business databases like Acxiom, Amacai/Localeze, and infoUSA directories.

3. A Business Web Site: Having a web site is not a requirement to being found in Google Maps. However, having a web site, and having pages that are properly optimized for local search keyword would most surely be a factor in the local search algorithm.

4. Listings in 2nd-tier Local Directories and Vertical Directories: Listing your business on 2nd tier directory like yellowpages, City search, Yelp, InsiderPages besides this Google Maps pulls data from verticals such as TripAdvisor, ChefMoz, Gayot.com, Fodors, Travelocity, Wcities.com, Frommers, and HotelGuide.net.

5. Proximity to location: Not too long ago, this was a prime factor in many local search algorithms. A local search SERP used to show listings based on proximity by default. That’s not the case anymore, but for any location-based search, it still has to play some part in the algorithm.

6. Location Prominence: The location prominence noted in the title to the document refers to factors that are intended to convey the best documents for the geographical area rather than documents based solely on their distance from a particular location within the geographical area.