Local Listing SEO – The Third Kind of SEO

Let me give you a new distinction. It’s an important one that not many people are aware of yet.

Your company’s website is a business asset. Its usefulness is limited by how many qualified visitors it gets. Especially for lead or sales generation, SEO – Search engine optimization – is a powerful way to encourage search engines to bring in your best clients.

In the past five or ten years, there have been two main kinds of SEO. The first is called “on site” SEO. That is what YOU (or your webmaster) place on the website: the words chosen for your copy, the page title, the copy in the header tags, and the “meta” parameters that search engines read when crawling your website.

Since it’s your website, you have 100% complete control over what goes on it. That’s “on site” SEO.

Off-site SEO has to do with what other people on the web say about your website. When they link to your website, the words they choose to place in that clickable link are considered very carefully by search engines.

Imagine your company sells bicycles. One of your happy customers has a blog, and writes a positive review of their bicycle-buying experience. In the article, they place a web link to your website, with the words “bicycle store.” When someone clicks on “bicycle store”, they are taken to your company site.

The search engines will take that link as an endorsement. When someone visits Google or Bing or Yahoo!, and types in “bicycle store”, your website is now more likely to come up on the first page of results. That’s off-site SEO.

By analogy, on-site SEO is what you proclaim about yourself. Off-site SEO is what other people are saying about you.

In 2009, a new phenomenon began to emerge: the local listing service. It’s making a new form of SEO possible… call it “Local Listing SEO”. And it’s ripe for your business to benefit from now.

By “local listing” services, I mean applications that are focused on helping consumers find goods and services near their current location. Google Maps, Yelp, Google Local Business, Yellowpages.com, Mapquest, Citysearch, and more. The list of such services changes constantly; new ones emerge and yesterday’s champions fade. As a phenomenon, though, it seems to have real staying power.

All of them allow a business to submit their information into their local-business database. So if your company has a website, you want to make sure each local listing service has your information.

The location targeting can be a tremendous boon. A client who owns a boat-rental business in Lewisville, Texas asked us to help improve his search engine rankings. His prospects will search for the words “boat club”, but there is fierce competition for that in search engines.

But properly setting up his Google local business listing changed everything. We were able to get his site at the TOP of Google’s search results for “Lewisville boat club” within one day!

Another client, the owner of a firearms training business, had a similar experience. Before we started, we couldn’t find his website in search engines at all. But we were able to get his page to be NUMBER ONE in the local business search results for “firearms training” in San Francisco! All thanks to properly setting up his company’s entries in local listing services.

Local listing SEO is becoming more and more important. In fact, at Mobile Web Up, we expect it to matter for many years, especially for your prospects who go online with mobile devices. That’s why we include local listing SEO in our standard mobile website service.