The Comscore Search report for June has been released. Google had 10.29 billion searches. If roughly the same percentage of searches (20%) had local intent as Google has indicated then there were approximately 2,187,200,000 searches in the U.S. on Google’s main search site last month that were local in nature.

Your local address and phone number need to be on the front page and every page.  This establishes your bona fides as a local business.  This address and phone number should also be the same address and phone number that you use on blogs, other websites, YouTube, YellowPages.com, Google Place, Yahoo, and all other directories or local search engines.  Even if you never have anyone come to your place of business or operate out of your home, use this address to clearly identify yourself as local.

Page Footer Example

Create a local keyword footer at the very bottom of every page.  This should look something like    Italian Restaurant Beverly Hills | Italian Restaurant Los Angeles | Pizza Beverly Hills | Pizza Los Angeles | wine tasting Beverly Hills | wine tasting Los Angeles |     You have 50 words (250 characters) for this footer.   Don’t hesitate to include five suburbs in this area or 10 keywords with one or two suburbs.

3.  You need to repeat your Keywords in your headline and the first 150 words of content on your first page.  Do not overdo this.  Just keep it natural.  Don’t go crazy trying to get 3.765 keyword density.  But don’t neglect to get these keywords in.  Make at least one instance of each keyword Bold and link to an appropriate inside page.  Once again, use the city (s) here, too.

Today, we have the second tip.

2.  Your URL matters now.  In the past, the URL might be something easy to remember, or cute.  No longer.  I am not recommending  that you throw out your current website URL to get better keywords in your URL.  You get points from Google for having an website that’s been around for a while.  However, if you are starting a new website, use keywords in the site URL, not your company name or some cute phrase unless that name or phrase has keywords in it.
Also, make your internal pages into landing pages by adding appropriate keywords to the url like this   .com/keyword-keyword.  Use your important city name in the URL and/or the landing page URL.  Example:  italianrestaurant.com/Miami-Beach

In the specific case of Local SEO, the rules of the game have been changing so rapidly that most companies who profess to be experts in local search engine optimization have to work like crazy to keep up. Whether by design or by failure of design, Google keeps their methods a secret. The result is a constant scramble by those who need to know. The goal is to unravel the methods and use them to the advantage of SEO clients.

If a local business owner spent ten hours a week or so trying to stay on top of the local SEO news, he or she might be able to stay on page one of organic listings and Google Places. But that would assume that they are spending even more time or money actually implementing the strategies they learn about.

Google Places alone has made almost weekly changes over the past 6 months: changing the brand, offering posts, reducing the outside maximum on the outside pack to seven from ten, now allow links in the listings at two places, came out with a specific list of rules on some issues, created a paid ad called tags, have eliminated the direct link on the short listing to the website, and have added a problem center (albeit as of now it is one way). These are just the major changes. The entire list would be the subject of another entire article.

Over the course of the next ten days, I will provide the inside information that we might seem foolish to reveal. Your SEO consultant doesn’t want this list to see the light of day. But you need to know it. The main reason is so that you can tell your web designer who claims to know local SEO how to correctly set up your website. You need to know it so that you can help the SEO expert who tells you they will get you on page 1 for hundreds of dollars per month, but your phone never rings.

Here is Tip One of Ten on Local SEM Through Use of SEO

Title Appears Above the URL address Bar on Most Browsers

1. Meta Title Tags may be the most critical words on your website. This title tag is often what will be the headline in search, and Google thinks this is what is important to you. Your title tag should not be “Home” or “Joe’s Restaurant.” It should be “keyword keyword keyword city keyword keyword city.” Using restaurant as an example: “Italian Restaurant Pizza Beverly Hills | Wine Tasting | Los Angeles” You get 64 characters to tell your story.

The Title is Commonly Used by Google as the Headline

Through various reasons intended and unintended, the client had created 4 Google Places Listings.  They had also recently changed their website.  There had not been a lot of effort to insure that they were listed on all the major directories and search engines.  However, they did have a nice number of reviews and citations.  Just not as many as the competition.

We have had the account now for about 6 weeks.  You can see the results on this Google Places chart of analytics.  We are still expecting to be able to increase these results even more.