How to Get Citations for Local SEO

As more people are starting to find out, local SEO is taking over the world of search engines: over 20 percent of all Google searches are for a local business. More important, that number doubles when users are searching with mobile devices. This trend is showing itself in SERPs. Gone are the days of merely receiving 10 organic listings. Now, SERPs are infiltrated by images, videos and other media. But most important, local listings are now more than ever making their way into SERPs. Newly-captured data for Google searches show that users are tending to use Google Places listings over organic listings. Just look at the heat map below: It is obvious that local businesses need to get involved in Google Places in order to survive and thrive online. But Google does not make this terribly easy. The first step is to launch a Google Places page. You cannot get ranked in local listings without one. The next step is getting citations, which are essentially what links are for organic listings. To this, the more locations your business information is listed, the better off you are for search engines to find your business and place you in their local rankings. So, how do you get these citations, you ask?

1) Join the Aggregators Search engines are not the only means to find local businesses. There are also tons of local directories that people use. It’d be a good idea to set up a page on each. It will not only help your local SEO, but it will also establish multiple new ways for people to find you. Here are some of the bigger names that you’d do well to get involved with: Superpages, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Angie’s List, City Search, Urban Spoon, Open Table, Trip Advisor, Merchant Circle, Yahoo! Local, Dex Knows, Express Update USA, Judy’s Book, Kudzo, Yellow Bot, Insider Pages, Localeze, Shop City.

2) Search for Your Competitors You know the old saying: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Well, that’s the case with local SEO. You should definitely search for your competitors to see what they’re doing. For local SEO, you’re trying to see where they’re listed.

3) Social Media and Blogs With social cues becoming a huge factor in determining rankings, you should have your complete contact information on each of your social networks, i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. As well, local bloggers usually have a local businesses page that lists places in the area. Searching with your city name + blog is a good place to start. You can narrow this field down by adding your industry: city name + food blogs. Also, be sure to check out blogs.com.

4) Local Directories and Newspapers Remember newspapers? They still exist. In fact, some people even use them instead of search engines. Thus, if you’re using local SEO, these are resources you must tap. If you are hosting an event or something of that nature, let your local paper know so they can list it.

If you have any comments or questions, please let us know. Click to contact an Online Marketing, SEO Los Angeles.

Advantages of hiring a SEO Company India

Many people who run their own websites often wonder why they would want to hire the services of a search engine optimization firm in order to get more traffic. However, what many people fail to realize is that there are a lot of search engine optimization techniques that can be used in order to increase the visibility of a website, so you will have to make sure that you utilize these techniques in order to get the maximum output from your business. Without the help of a professional search engine optimization expert, you will not be able to carry out all of these methods, either due to a lack of resources or due to the lack of understanding, which makes hiring a SEO company very important for you.

In India, people are fast realizing the importance of running an online business and how profitable it can be, which is why you are seeing a lot of different online businesses being run from India. Now, as is obvious, these businesses require the help of a good SEO Company India in order to be able to run properly, or otherwise their visibility would be seriously affected. Now, most people often wonder why they would want to hire a search engine optimization company from near their own region only because the internet allows them to stay in touch with almost anyone across the globe.

However, this is just a safety measure so that people will be able to avoid scams and problems later on. Moreover, you can easily keep a check on the company you are working with, so that there are no issues. There are numerous advantages of taking the services of a SEO company India, because most of the work and services that they offer are those which cannot be done by a person themselves.

First of all, the biggest issue upon creating a website is to ensure how the website must be made visible to the people. At present, there are literally hundreds and thousands of different websites in the world today, so creating one more website and then finding it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Unless you know the exact place as to where to look at (the domain address), you will not be able to find the website on the internet at all. In order to help with this, a SEO Company India like www.makerank.com will provide you with linking services, appropriate content finding and keyword research in order to ensure that your website is substantially visible. The first and the most important thing that you need is a listing on the top search engines, so with the help of a good SEO Company India, you will need to get search engine submissions so that your website is able to appear in the search results.

A lot of backlinks are also required in order to get your website up and running. You will need lots of traffic on your page, or otherwise there are chances that your business will go down the drain.

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For more information about SEO Company India, please visit http://www.makerank.com