What is Local SEO & How Can it Help My Business?

Google’s Local 3-Pack for Jacksonville Searches

As a Local SEO company in Jacksonville one of the most common questions we receive from clients and prospective clients is “Why doesn’t my business show up in the map on the first page of Google search results?” In the video below, we explain why your business may not be showing up and what steps we can take to get your business on the map.

Local SEO and the Google 3-Pack

When we say “local seo” we’re talking about searches performed with “local intent” – which typically means the city name is attached to a search query. When this type of search is performed in Google, 93% of the time a little map will show up on the first page of search results. At the time of this writing the map “features” three local businesses – hence the name “Local 3-Pack”. If you run a local business you know the importance getting your business onto this map. So let’s look at the reasons why your business may not be showing up.

Possible Reasons Your Business Does Not Appear In Local 3-Pack

• business listing is not claimed
• listing is not optimized
• too few citations for your local business

The importance of citations for your local business SEO

A citation is essentially another business listing online that Google and other search engines can use as a point of reference, to learn more about the location of your company and what your company offers.

If your local business doesn’t have many citations or if there are inaccuracies, search engines can’t be sure if the listing information is trustworthy enough to be placed in the most prominent area of the page 1 search results. This is called “NAP Consistency” (Name, Address, Phone). If you’ve been in business a few years, there is a good chance you’ve had more than one office address, or perhaps a local and toll-free phone number. Some of your citations may be referencing different physical addresses, suite number versus no suite number, or different phone numbers. So our job as a Jacksonville local SEO company is to ensure you have a large number of local business citations, all with accurate information. How do we do that?

How To Grow and Manage Local Business Citations

There are literally hundreds of websites which may have a local business citation for your company. Fortunately, we don’t have to manually update every website one-by-one. The vast majority of these websites retrieve their local business data from one of five major data aggregators for local business information, which include Axciom, Factual, Neustar Localeze, Infogroup, and Foursquare.

For our local SEO services we have utilized and recommend two excellent software platforms for everyday management – Moz Local and YEXT Powerlistings. These platforms allow us to add a large number of data points for our client listings and that information is pushed out to the data aggregators which, in turn, get disseminated throughout the local business listing network.

These software tools also allow us to remove or close inaccurate listings and increase NAP consistency across the web. When we combine NAP consistency with a strong SEO foundation on your website, we can greatly improve your online visibility and get your company closer to Local 3-Pack domination. When we need more firepower we have yet another software tool which allows us to see exactly which businesses are in the Local 3-Pack for a particular search query, how many citations they have, and which citations they have which we do not. When we follow those trails and all three of the above conditions are met, we are nearly 100% successful in getting our clients on the map.

Free Visibility Analysis

If you’ve got more questions about local seo or if you would like us to take a look at your business profile, give us a call at 904-742-3626 or send a message through our Contact page and we’ll meet with you and/or provide a free analysis.

Thank you for your time, I hope you enjoyed this post!
– Andre