Optimizing the following four sections will help you get the most out of your local business listing.

Images By: Bob Jagendorf – CC BY 2.0

1. Your Business’s Name or Title
   The name or title of your business is very important in helping your business rank effectively on local search engines. Maintaining a consistent business name or title everywhere your business is mentioned online is of absolute importance, as it helps search engines create connections and correlations between your local business listings, which, in turn, helps build trust and authority in the authenticity of your business.
2. Local Citations and Links
   Major search engines discover your business online through 2 basic methods:
   a. Crawling through links to your website found on other web pages and measuring on which sites those links are found.
   b. Noting and connecting your business’s local citations and measuring on which sites those citations are found.
   These two discovery criteria are extremely important factors used by search engines to determine how and where to rank your business. For argument’s sake, if you were to disregard all other ranking factors used by search engines, the following would be true …
   The business with the highest number of local citations from quality websites and the most number of backlinks from quality websites, such as a local government or educational site, will out rank everyone else on local search engine results. Distributing your NAP (business name, address, and phone number) across as many quality sites as possible (while maintaining consistency with the way that information is displayed) will generate the most, high quality local citations for your business.
3. Categories
   Most local business listing services will allow you to put your business into several pre-defined industry-type categories. This may, at first, seem like an unnecessary step, but understand that search engine’s main objective is to comprehend, index, and categorize your business listing correctly, so it appears appropriately in relevant search results. Further helping the search engines “pre-categorize” your business listing will only get you that much further ahead.
4. Customer Ratings and Reviews
   Reviews and ratings are important for two reasons. Oftentimes, the reviews contain keywords, which describe your business. Since these reviews come through customers and not through your business, they are considered user generated content. User generated content plays its own role in helping your business listings rank well. Reviews and ratings also serve as testimonials created by your customers for future customers. People are much more likely to become your customer, once they have read a positive review about your business.

Local business listings are important in helping your business rank well on today’s locally focused search engines. Getting the most out of your business listing, by optimizing your business title, prolifically creating local citations, selecting categories, and encouraging customer reviews, will only help your business be successful online.