While you were eagerly waiting for a more in-depth explanation on how Google local business listings work I took a holiday and went to Peru. Not really…I was working on the next post.

Last time we covered that Google local business listings (GBL) are one of the best ways to attract healthy local traffic. We went through the how’s and why’s and now we get to the where - where Google takes its decision making data from. You are also going to be blessed with more hows - how you can make sure that your listings stand a better chance of higher rankings.

Improve yours site's traffic with local business listings. Image Credit: Livros de Redes Sociais

Google’s local business listings are housed inside the Google local business centre – also known as the GLBC. The GLBC works with 2 main data resources – trusted data providers and Web crawling. It uses these two data resources as well as the data you add to your Google listing as part of the indexing algorithm.

You may want to have a look at the previous post on local business listings to brush up on what you learnt.

Below are tips on how each sector is used by Google and in what ways you can use each sector optimally to get your ads higher rankings.

GLBC 

• Is used for consistency and prominence in the indexing algorithm.
• It concerns the business contact data – phone number, address, business name or title.
• If this data matches the trusted data, it will be given more weight online.
• If there are listings that you did not create and that are incorrect, get them changed and associated with your business by claiming them.
• Categories are used for accuracy and consistency. They need to be very accurate in order to drive the most relevant traffic, as well as to match the information that you give.
• If possible use keywords for your site to make your site and business more relevant to the category.
• Try not to make the category too niche or too broad.

Trusted Data

• This is also used for consistency and prominence in the indexing algorithm.
• It also concerns the business contact data – phone number, address, business name or title. The difference is that the business owner may not have entered this information on the sites etc.
• Trusted data providers are sites where Google gets information about the local businesses during its initial index. Like old phone books. They are sites like YellowPages.com.
• These sites typically have the most accurate and up to date information because the business owners consider these sites to be very important for users.
• It is where businesses get listed online instead of offline.
• It is possible to get these listings edited if the information changes.
• It is imperative that the data listed on these sites is correct as this is where all of the search engines get your business data from. You don’t want to have the wrong information being associated with your business.
• If Google sees that the data does not match your local business listing information, your listing will have lower trust and lower weighting.

Web Crawling

• This is used to check Web reference accuracy.
• You should check where your business is listed and if you can change or add any contact details. The more data that matches with your GBL the better.
• Because these business listings are a Google product any changes that need to be made to the info you have online should apparently start with your GBL, as they will be given more weighting.
• It is important that these listings are associated with your location and industry. i.e. dog grooming in Wexford needs to be mentioned if your company is a dog grooming parlor and situated in Wexford.
• Links, citations and reviews are a big part of the crawlable section:

1. Review sites are a good place to target as you can specify the location, industry and correct contact information.
2. It should be a strategy for business owners to get their clients or customers to review them on sites such as yelp.com, blogs or Google reviews.
3. Volume of reviews is important as well – the more the better. In the same vein you don’t want to over do it or be shady about them.
4. It is better to get genuine reviews than to make up your own.

• One way to find some of the online mentions that are being crawled but do not contain your address is to type in “site:quirk.biz –sir lowry road”. This will return results for links to your site that do not contain your address. It may be possible to contact the sites that are using those links and get all of your contact information listed, including your phone number.

This may seem a little daunting and indeed it is a bit of a large task. But wouldn’t you rather be putting all of this work into Google’s local business listings and getting good results instead of bad? Low positions on the SERPS compared to high? It’s all for the greater good.

David Mihm says it best: “The search engines rely on so many different providers for their Local business data, it’s hard even for experts to keep track of where it’s all coming from”. To help win the battle, he has created a tool called GetListed to check if your business is listed correctly on the 3 main Search Engines: Google, MSN and Yahoo!. It could be easier for business owners or SEOers to find where data needs to be changed. Huzzah for The Mihm!

If you would like to see a good diagramatic representation of the above information, Rand Fishkin and David Mihm have a really good video online where they discuss these local business ranking factors.

Go forth and conquer!

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