When you create a new listing in Google’s Local Business Center (LBC), you may be prompted if there are existing listings for your business. For those unfamiliar with the LBC, it’s where you create a business profile that shows up in Google Maps, as well as the natural search listings. Here’s an example:

Why would there already be a listing for your business? Because Google sometimes creates listings for businesses that have not yet created their own, and it does this by pulling information from sources across the web, including human-powered directories. It’s common that these Google-gathered listings have errors—for example, you may have changed your phone number or relocated since Google gathered its information.

There is often much confusion on what the proper steps are when you discover more than one existing local listing for your business in the search engines. The thing to do is claim and edit the existing listing.

It’s important to remember: For each physical location of your business, you should have only one listing. Having more than one can negatively impact the position of all of your listings, decreasing your visibility among local prospects (bad).

What if there are multiple listings? Google has recommended some steps to take to properly handle multiple listings for their Local Business Center:

1. Choose the listing that you’d prefer to keep in your account. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing and this listing only.
2. For duplicates of this listing in your account (the ones you want to remove), remove all enhanced information. Keep only required information, like the business title, address, and one phone number.
3. Submit these changes and verify as necessary.
4. Now, sit tight for a couple of weeks – just for good measure.
5. Delete the duplicates from your account, choosing Remove this listing from my Local Business Center account.

The key point to remember is that it’s crucial to have one optimized listing for your business. This entry should have all of the additional information and be as close to 100 percent complete as possible. Local search has a ton of potential for small business and creating this optimized listing can dramatically increase your visibility among your target market and create a steady stream of free inbound leads.

Yes, it’s true: Some people continue to use phone books.

But today’s consumer increasingly favors that great information repository known as the Internet, and they use search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to find what they’re looking for. With this change comes a new mandate for businesses: make sure your web site gets found.

So how does one get found in the search engines? If your business serves a competitive market, just having a web site doesn’t mean you’ll rank for key search terms. Google may list your competitors ahead of you in the search listings, and studies show that searchers rarely even look at the results beyond the top three. If you’re not in the ‘Golden Triangle’ you’ll get crumbs for clicks while your competitors get all the action.

We can help. We’re offering a free three-part webinar on search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing your web site’s content and code for better placement in the search results. It also involves off-site factors, such as acquiring inbound links (which Google interprets as votes) from other web sites.

The series will help businesses ‘SLEEP’ their way to the top of the search results. (SLEEP: search, leverage, evaluate, estimate, perform). At the end of the series, we’ll provide attendees with a free SEO checklist that will help you apply what you’ve learned to your business’ web site. Register for the webinar today!

As discussed in my last post, finding the right keywords for your search marketing campaigns is essential for getting the right traffic to your web site at the right price. But many small and midsized businesses should also consider adding geographic keyword modifiers to their search campaigns to really target their search marketing campaigns. In this post, we’ll define geographic modifiers and discuss why they are important to localized search marketers.

What is a geographic modifier?
A geographic keyword modifier is the use of a geographic term in the beginning, end, or in the middle of a keyword term. For example, if my core keyword was “health insurance,” you could geographically modify the keyword by adding the term “Denver” to it, making it “Denver health insurance” or “health insurance Denver.”  Pretty straight forward, eh?

Why would I use a geographic modifier?
Even if a business wants to appeal to searchers on a national basis, it’s not a bad idea to start out by targeting a local market, because they will be able to see better results more quickly. Why? Because competition can be fierce on the national level, and the timeline for success can be considerably longer.

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Selecting the Right Keywords for Search Engine Marketing

Here’s a fundamental concept that all budding search marketers need to understand: How to choose effective keywords for your online marketing efforts.

While approaches and strategy change from medium to medium (search engine optimization keywords vs. pay-per-click keywords vs. local search keywords) there are some fundamentals of keyword selection that work across all types of search engine marketing.

Defining Keywords
Before we jump into the actual keyword selection process, I want to define what a keyword is in a search engine marketing context. So, in the context of this description, we’ll refer to a keyword as:

A single word or multi-word phrase that is used when searching for information on a search engine.

Even though “keyword” seems to indicate that it’s only a single word, such as “insurance,” it can also be a short phrase, such as “auto insurance,” or an even long phrase like “my grandmother wants to buy auto insurance for her 1982 Buick.” In this context, if a searcher is searching for something on a search engine, that search is a keyword! (That’s a lot of search in one sentence!)

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