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Local Search Ranking Factors

Local search is becoming increasingly important to libraries. After all we have geographically located branches and collections in order to be nearer to our clients and users. These postings and the infographic below help with understanding what can be done to make sure your site is visible to the search engines in a local context.

Web Equity Infographic
Web Equity by Mike Blumenthal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.blumenthals.com.

Local Search Ranking Factors by David Mihm

Understanding the 98 Google Local Ranking Factors by Rod Young

The Basics: Immediately Actionable Items

There are two different ways to look at the top local ranking factors: what matters and what you should work on. Several of the key factors to ranking well are out of the typical company’s grasp, so a list of top 10 recommended action-ready factors were compiled in addition to an evaluation of the ranking factor list itself. Those actionable factors are:
1. Your physical address matching/listing the city where you’re located.
2. Manually verifying your ownership of the company’s Google Places page.
3. Having proper category associations for your page and citations.
4. Having a large number of “traditional structured citations” for your business (on sites like Internet yellow pages and local place aggregators).
5. Having your address listed on your company website, and make sure that address is crawlable.
6. Having a well-ranked (PR) company website.
7. Having high-quality inbound links to your company website.
8. Having your phone number listed on your company website, and making sure that phone number is crawlable.
9. Having an accurate local area code listed on your Google Places page.
10. Having your city and state listed in the page title for your Google Places landing page.
The items listed above can be treated as a checklist for establishing bare minimums for local search optimization.”

Is your library there? Check yourself out by doing searches on Bing and Google as well as Google Maps. Can your users find you easily? Will they trip over your services in a standard search for libraries or books?

Stephen

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Posted on: July 20, 2011, 8:16 am Category: Uncategorized

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