Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search

While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords.  For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”,  “Music, Nicholasville KY”,  and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:

• Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less
• Local Groupings

There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:

• have pages, mentioning your area of service
• your phone number
• your physical address
• directions on how to reach your office
• use landmarks (“after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower” that’s three landmarks altogether)
• have links pointing to you from local websites and directories
• have a domain hosted locally (if locality is your primary concern)
• have ccTLD (country-specific domain – google.ca, for instance)

Do you have other suggestions? Please comment on this post!