It seems I’m not the only one, either. Recent studies indicate that print yellow pages will be all but defunct in the next 4 years. The myriad of local business information available on the internet and the bevy of options you can use to find that information have made it easier, faster, and more convenient than flipping through that bulky yellow book.

What does this mean to you as a local business owner? Well if you haven’t spent the time to list your business in the local search engines, internet yellow pages, and customer review sites, then your competitors may be leaving you in the dust.

Whether you run a restaurant, auto body shop, pet grooming service, or landscaping company, taking the steps below to position your business in front of local customers will make a big difference to your bottom line.

The Anatomy of a Local Business Listing

Whether your listing is in a local search engine, internet yellow pages site, or customer review site, there are certain elements of your listing that will be similar across the board. Not just limited to your company name, address, and phone number, online local business listings allow you to display a ton of information about your business – for free! I’m always amazed when I see bare bones listings that aren’t taking full advantage, but it happens fairly often. Below is just a sample of the information you are allowed to display on pretty much any local listing:

• Company Name
• Address
• Phone Number
• Fax Number
• URL
• E-Mail Address
• Short Description of Business
• Services, Products, and Brands Offered
• Specialties and Amenities
• Payment Options
• Hours of Operation
• Logo
• Photos
• User Reviews

Wow! And to think that many businesses only list their name, address, and phone number. You might be saying, but my local business listing only has my name, address, and phone number. What do I do? Next I’ll show you the sites you need to visit to enhance your local business listing.

Internet Yellow Pages

The most logical places for many people to start looking for local goods and services are the internet yellow page sites. If you are brand new to updating and optimizing your company’s local listing, this is a great place to start.
Now just like the regular print yellow pages, the internet yellow pages will typically have a basic listing for your company without you having to add it. It’s up to you to make it pop and really work to drive customers from their computer screen to your storefront.

Upon locating your listing you may be surprised to find that it contains information you didn’t provide. This is because customers are allowed to update and add to your listing as well – all the more reason to take action to make sure your information is correct.

In addition to your free listing, many internet yellow pages offer advertising and fee-based enhanced feature options to give your listing that extra boost above your competitors.

Some of the most popular internet yellow pages sites for you to get started on are:

• YellowPages.com
• SuperPages.com
• YellowBook.com
• Local.com

Local Search Engines

It didn’t take long for the major search engines to get in on the local scene. Each of the major players in search has a local version. Google Local quickly became Google Maps, Yahoo has Yahoo Local, and Ask has AskCity.

Each has pretty robust features, but because of my unhealthy obsession with all things Google, and to give you a head start on the most market share, I’ll talk about Google Maps.

Like in the internet yellow pages, your business will likely already have a listing in Google Maps. You can spice up that listing from Google’s Local Business Center. To edit your listing, Google requires that you “claim” your business. They will send a postcard to the mailing address listed with a special pin number that you will use to “claim” your business. Naturally, this will take a few days. Once claimed, however, you can edit your listing to your heart’s content.

Your local business listing on Google allows for all the features listed above. Google also pulls a lot of user reviews from customer review sites which I’ll explain in the next section. Additionally there are a couple of really cool features that Google offers that you simply must take advantage of. The first is coupons. You can create a special offer coupon right along side your listing and update it as often as you want. This is a great way to encourage people to visit your store.

The next feature is one Google has added fairly recently – video. That’s right, you can add a video from YouTube to your Google Maps listing. How cool is that? Think of the possibilities! You could shoot a short commercial, record testimonials from happy customers or even shoot footage of your clean restaurant teeming with enthusiastic diners.

Once you’ve perfected your listing on Google Maps, you can choose to promote it through Google Adwords and target a particular region, city, or even neighborhood. For more information, and to get started go to maps.google.com or google.com/local/add.

Customer Review Websites

Customer review sites are arguably the most important of the 3 areas of local search because the content is user-generated. And like I mentioned above, other local search engines will pull customer reviews from these websites to display on your listing, so it’s important to be aware of what people are saying.
This is a great way to do a little PR for your business by encouraging your happy customers to post positive reviews of your company and its services. You can also benefit from monitoring any unfavorable reviews to see where you can improve your business.

Popular customer review sites include:

• Yelp.com
• InsiderPages.com
• CitySearch.com
• JudysBook.com

There are even specialized customer review sites like AngiesList.com for home improvement and MenuPages.com for restaurants.

A Quick Word About Mobile Search

Mobile search is usually mentioned in tandem with local search. After all, people are more frequently on the road when they are looking for food, gas, lodging, or the nearest pet store. The good news is that if you do the work on all the sites mentioned in this article, you will be more than covered in the mobile search arena. Most if not all of the local search engines and internet yellow pages have special mobile versions that are readable on mobile phones and other handhelds including the ever popular iPhone.

I hope this crash course in local search marketing was helpful. By getting started on the tips I mentioned, you should definitely start seeing a big improvement in your business whether you run a one person dog walking service or a local pizza franchise. And when delivery of the phone book finally comes to a grinding halt, your business won’t miss a beat.

And while these are all very crucial elements to building targeted traffic to your website through the search engines, they are in fact building blocks of a larger SEO structure. They all rely on each other to support the SEO foundation. If any one of these building blocks is missing, the structure will collapse, and you could miss out on profitable search engine traffic. But if you truly understand the relationship of these building blocks, you will have a rock solid foundation with which to execute all the tips and tricks you learn, and will see your search engine traffic and profits soar!

When doing research for this article, I was looking for some ideas for the simplest and most direct way to explain the different building blocks of SEO and how they relate to each other. I found one so brilliant I wish I could take credit for it. But I have to tip my hat to the folks at SEOmoz for inventing this diagram.

All of the techniques and building blocks that you’ve read or heard about fit into one of the above components or cornerstones of SEO. Every building block of SEO can be categorized as a technical component, a content component or a trust component. Now that you’re wondering what fits where, let’s dive on in!

Technical SEO Component

The technical SEO components are typically what scare people the most, especially if they are new to SEO. But you don’t have to have a detailed understanding of how these technical components work to know what they are. And if you know what they are, then you can reasonably talk to your web designer about them. Executing the wrong technical components on your website could result in the search engine spiders being unable to access the content on your site. They include, but are not limited to:

• Websites built entirely in Flash
• Including important text in images
• Use of iFrames
• Use of session ID’s

The above technical no-no’s should be prevented to allow the search engines to access your content. This is the first crucial component to address. Kind of like giving the search engines the keys to your house. Of course, once you’ve let them in, you need to give them a guided tour. This is where the content component comes in to play.

Content SEO Component

The content component of SEO is the one that is discussed the most. Typically this is in terms of keyword research and writing keyword relevant articles. It is very important for business owners to understand the language their potential customers use when searching for their products. If you are optimizing a product page for “key fobs” and everyone searches for “key chains”…well you see the disconnect.

But content issues don’t end with keyword research and article writing. Information architecture is an often neglected part of the content component. Information architecture basically breaks down to navigation and linking structure of your website. Now that you’ve given your search engine friends the keys to your house, how hard are you making it for them to find the bathroom?

In terms of information architecture, the easier you make it for your readers and customers to find your content, the better it will be for the search engines. This includes using things like:

• Flat site architecture – The fewest number of clicks from the home page to important content.
• Breadcrumb links
• Anchor text links within articles
• Universal link menus

By using the same language as your customers, and holding their hands as you guide them through your site, you will automatically be doing the same for the search engines.

So now that you’ve given the search engines the keys to your house and arranged the furniture to make a path to a door clearly marked, “bathroom”, you need to make sure they aren’t afraid to come inside.

Trust SEO Component

The third and final component to building a rock solid SEO foundation is trust. Simply defined, this boils down to links. Building a strong network of inbound links from relevant, trusted sources tells the search engines that your site is also a trusted source for your particular niche or market. When the search engines trust your site, they will be more likely to serve it up in the top of their results pages.

When you break down SEO into these 3 main components, it’s much easier to see how they relate to each other, and how success can only be achieved when all 3 are present. If your search engine friends trust you, but can’t get in the front door your site won’t rank. If they can get in front door, but stumble over the coffee table to get to the only bathroom upstairs that you’ve labeled, “kitchen”, your site won’t rank. Only if they trust you enough to use your keys to breeze through the living room to the bathroom will your site rank. This is your foundation to generating tons of targeted search engine traffic and sales for your website.