In this Edition

In the famous words of Tip O'Neil, "All politics is local." If you own a business with a physical location (or more than one location,) the same can be said of SEO.

For businesses that do business solely on the web, local SEO is not important. But, if you need people to come into your establishment to business, you need to focus on helping people find you on search engines in the area immediately near your location (or locations).

Blow up the balloons. Those little red balloons on Google Maps drive local sales. Help Google out by filling out Google Place information as completely as possible.

Location matters. Google can tell how far your location is from the center of a given city and it affects how you rank. Not much you can do about this, unless you're willing to relocate. With regular SEO the address of a physical location is unimportant. The opposite is true for Local SEO. Contact information and your address should take precedence if you want to rank for local search. Some sites go so far as to list their address on every page.

Not having Google reviews can hurt you. So can having a review score of only one. On a happy note, having five or more Google reviews can significantly help you in local search. Therefore it is important to encourage friends, families and customers to write reviews. But don't pay for reviews, install a computer in your business to have customers write reviews on site or engage in fraudulent review practices. When Google finds out (and they will) they can strip you of your local listing all together.

Be descriptive. While the presence of a business description doesn't help local SEO, having the search category in the business description helps.

Go mobile. More and more people are using mobile phones and tablets to search locally on line. Therefore it is extremely important to make sure you website is optimized for mobile users.