This guest blog post is written by OMI instructor Mike Belasco of seOverflow.com.

When planning and executing a local search campaign there are six areas where you should put your focus:

• Local search audit
• Repair your NAP
• Optimize your Google, Yahoo, and Bing Profiles
• Optimize your website for local
• Build Citations
• Build Reviews

A Local search audit will help you identify opportunities and potential issues that need to be addressed as part of your local SEO efforts. A detailed description of how to perform a local search audit can be found on the LocalSearchToolkit.com blog.

If you have discovered problems with your NAP (name, address and phone number) in your business listings on the internet, it is important to get those fixed ASAP. There are many potential causes of problems with your NAP or as we call it “data confusion” but regardless of the source it does need to be repaired. Try to use the map of the Local Search Ecosystem to trace the problem back to its source.

Now that you’ve fixed your NAP your next step towards Local Search success is to optimize your “business profiles” on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. My colleague Dev Basu has an excellent five part series in which part 2 and part 3 describe claiming and optimizing your profiles.

With Google’s changes to their algorithm at the end of October 2010, it became more important than ever that your website is properly optimized in order to rank well in the local search results. Our friends over at Expand2Web have an excellent 10 part series on how to optimize your website for local starting from keyword research heading all the way down to your robots.txt file. Most SEO best practices apply when optimizing your site for local however there are a few tips and tricks specific to local that you’ll definitely want to take into consideration.

Remember the SAT? Well here is an analogy problem for you to figure out. Organic SEO: Links :: Local SEO : ??. Time is up! The answer is Citations. Citations are the “links” of local search. For a deeper explanation see our post on citations. One of the best ways to create a list of citations to target is to see where your competitors are getting their citations. There are two free tools available to help with this: www.localsearchtoolkit.com and www.whitespark.ca/tools/local-citation-finder.

Lastly any successful local SEO effort (in a competitive space) must include a strategy to obtain and manage legitimate reviews. We recommend using a tool like www.myreviewspage.com to monitor and request reviews. I would also recommend making sure you have a strategy on how to edit, respond, or remove reviews. Miriam Ellis has an extremely detailed write up about editing, responding and removing reviews on her blog. You can find good sites on which to get reviews for your business using www.localsearchtoolkit.com.

Hey no one said Local Search success would be easy! I know there is a lot to do so you’d better get started right away. Good luck with your local search efforts.

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