Almost every single week, one my students reach out to me and ask about that special little secret to ranking in the Local Business Results.

Now I’m providing some local content for Dan Thies and Leslie Rohde from SEO BrainTrust, and sure enough, their students was the same secret sauce.

Whether someone emails me, sends me a tweet, raises their hand while I’m on stage or one of our client from our Algonquin Web Development company, I get asked….what’s the secret?

Well, if you know anything about ranking a website on the Internet, it’s a process called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A search engine looks a several factors, likely in the hundreds, to prioritize all the web pages it indexes. So, SEO is a skill that has many, many school of thoughts. You see, this special search engine never tells what they are looking for. So, us so called SEO experts learn the secrets and test and deploy.

Bottom line, to rank a website consistently on top you need inbound links and decent website. In the simplest form, the more high quality links you have with relevant, high quality content, the higher you’ll rank. Period. No money exchanged, no favorites, just a democratic ranking from Google based on what it thinks is value-added.

Now if you’re searching for [Chicago pizza delivery], in the last year on Google you’ve noticed a little map show up and shows you local businesses around your area. These results are called the local business results.

The BIG difference here is WHAT Google is ranking. They are not ranking website, but rather businesses. So how does Google decide what business should be shown when there is only a possible of 10 spots? We all know there are more than 10 pizza companies in Chicago worthy of being on this page.

So what’s the secret for the Local Business Results?

There is none! Really, no secret. The answer has been present even before the Internet existed. The answer is no different than what ranks webpages. No, it’s not links.

It’s a quality business that people are happy to recommend that provide a value-added product or service to the appropriate audience located in the right place for the largest target audience.
WHAT?

Alright. Imagine this. You’re an attorney in Edmonton, Canada. You hand your business card out to every car at the West Edmonton Mall. You hand out 1000. It takes you 3 hours.

The following week you attend the local chamber of commerce event and hand out 30 cards and you spend 3 hours networking.

Imagine now that each card you hand out is a like a link to your website. So in these two separate scenarios you have 1000 links or 30 links.

Now, in both of these scenarios and consider the success of this attorney in the real world, it’s likely that they’ll win or earn more business from the chamber event. The key here is networking. People don’t just buy attorney services and keep the attorney’s card for when they need. It’s a horrible way to market their business.

So, quality marketing is the secret? Well, I guess.

You see, that attorney is exposing themselves in different areas, the mall, the chamber, meetings. The attorney provides answers to questions, and the closer the answers are to helping solve their client’s problems, the better they’ll do.

I call this transparency and exposure. Therefore, the great transparency and exposure on the Internet yields higher rankings.

So the questions is, how does a business expose themselves and provide transparency on the Internet in order for the search engines to favor their business and rank it?

This one is simple.

Citations and Reviews.

A citations is merely a reference or mention of said business.
A review is merely a digital form of word of mouth..

Therefore the more the business is discussed and referenced, the higher it’ll do.

But it’s not just any review or citation. The authority and trust assigned to those reviews and citations make the difference, just like how 30 links can out rank 1000.

You need to have citations and reviews from highly trusted local and theme related sources.

If you want to learn more, whether you’re a business owner or online consultant, visit my online education portal for Local Marketing Education. Opt in for the free report and browse the site for a lot of free information.