| Local Places and Citations | $247 |
If you’re a business with a local focus and a real physical location, I’ve got some good news for you! For a long time page ranking for even local businesses was all about strange concepts like meta tags and keyword densities. Smart SEO firms were sometimes able to trick Google and the other search engines in to believing that their sites were always the most relevant and should be ranked the highest simply by manipulating their keywords and writing droning, overly simplified content that repeated their keywords, etc.
Nowadays, keyword research and creating relevant content and backlinks to your site is still very important, but now Google is giving evermore importance to the citations and local focus of 
businesses. You’ve probably already noticed this when you do a local search for something like a “dentist in Seattle” , you end up with a list results like the image to the left.
In this image, the red circles are the Google Places results and the portions that aren’t circled are the paid results from Google Adwords and Adwords Express. The organic searches based on keywords and a lot of the traditional SEO strategies, don’t show up until the very bottom of the first page.
As you can imagine, a change in focus like this severely impacted the rankings of thousands of businesses and has made it such an advantage to have a physical location for local search that those businesses without them are basically stuck on the second page of the results unless they want to pay a lot of money through adwords to get their ad positioned above the local searches.
That’s why, if you do business locally, you absolutely NEED to get your business set up on Google Places and the other search engine’s comparable local searches or you may end up with a lot less business!
This doesn’t mean that SEO is no longer taken in to effect! In fact, if it came down to 2 companies in a local search and both of them were listed on Google Places and cited on various directories across the internet, the company that would be listed first would still be the one with the best SEO. Therefore, the best long term strategy for any company looking to be well positioned in their local market is to make sure that all the onpage SEO is correctly done, there is a regular flow of content relevant to your keywords and there is backlinking going on AND everything is done to make sure it’s listed correctly on Google Places and cited across many directories and review sites across the internet.
