Universal Business Listing and Your Google Local Ranking

Are you trying to get your site to come up or rank higher in the Google “one box”? The “one box” is the Google local listing that comes up with a map and 10 local listings on the right side of the map when you do a search that has a local intent such as “Chicago Locksmith”. One of the best things you can do to improve your Google Local ranking is increase the amount of websites mentioning your company name and address. Google indexes these mentions on other websites and sees these mentions as “citations”.  I know what you’re thinking…what exactly are “citations” and how do I get more of  them?

What are Citations?

Citations are similar to backlinks for organic search engine optimization. The more quality citations your site gets, the better for your Google Local  ranking.  To be more precise, a citation is a mention of your company name and your company address together.  So for example, if a website such as Yelp mentions “XYZ Widgets” and puts their address “123 Main St. Chicago, IL 60606″ next to their company name – that is considered a citation for XYZ Widgets.  The more of these that XYZ Widgets gets, the more confident Google Local gets about listing XYZ Widgets higher for their target keyphrase.

Keeping it Consistent

It’s important to keep your company name and address data consistent in as many citations as possible.  For example, if your address on one site is listed as “123 Main Street, Suite 3, Chicago, IL 60606″ it might be considered different than “123 main st., #3, Chicago IL, 60606″.  This can confuse search engines into thinking you are two seperate businesses at two seperate addresses.  Whatever you use,  “St.” instead of “Street” or “Suite 3″ instead of “#3″, make sure you pick one and stick with it…always.

One of the quickest and most effective ways to get more citations is to submit your local business to the Universal Business Listing service.  The service is an easy way to get listed and keep most of your citations consistent and only costs $30 per year.  Digital Third Coast has partnered with the Universal Business Listing service to help local businesses easily submit and update their local business data to a growing list of local data providers including Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing, Ask, Dex, Superpages, City Search, Superpages, Yelp, Yellowpages.com, Merchant Circle and much more. It also now includes 411 Directory Assistance and GPS navigation devices as well as OnStar.