Courtney Robertson

After years of helping small business owners with their social media and web development needs, it's time to help even more people.  To do that, I've launched my own podcast, The Local Small Business Show. It's available so far on:

• iTunes
• Stitcher
• SoundCloud
• Blackberry
• TuneIn
• Miro
• Windows (which doesn't give us links so search)
• and all other directories via RSS

In each show, you can expect to find the top 5 most important updates related to changes you need to make for your business's social media, website, and other digital marketing.  I'll keep you posted on the upcoming events, and share with you the pros that want to promote without being solicited.

Part of creating this show may be a bit self-serving.  I love helping everyone stay current in an ever-changing internet sphere, but need a better way to get the information out to more people at the same time.

I'll be hosting the podcast at Simple Local Business.  Simple Local Business is a project that I am working on to help small business owners learn the basics of maintaining their website, using social media, and connecting with their local community effectively.

To listen to the podcast, ask a question, or submit a review, visit http://simplelocalbusiness.com/podcastreview.

Google Places is a tool for business owners to claim their place on Google’s search results, much like the bygone days of the YellowPages.  Google Places is free, and has been available for years.

Finally,

Within each, you can edit the listing and view the dashboard.

You can quickly see the reviews others have left on Google as well as other review websites:

You can also see how many times your information was suggested in a local search result:

And within the insights, you can see how many people then used your information to navigate to your business:

The Google+ page link will take you to your Google+ Local page.

It will be absolutely important that you complete the listing information as thoroughly as possible and remain consistent with how you have claimed other local citations.

If you haven’t viewed your Google Places listing lately, now is the time to review the information.

Local SEO involves adding snippets of code to your website so that when people search for something in your region, your business should be discovered.  If my pipes burst, I don’t want to see the highest ranking plumber of all time, I want to see the plumbers in my town that can provide service to me. Local SEO is especially important for all businesses that need customers to actually walk into the store.

Earlier we looked at how to add the Local SEO Contact Form plugin to your site.  This makes quick work of the minimum information needed. For a more complete listing of additional snippets to add to your site, see Schema.org’s Local Business.

If you’d like more functionality than just a contact form and need more results than what you are getting now, take a look at Yoast’s Local SEO plugin.  This adds considerable functionality for things such as:

• Multiple locations
• Widgets (maps, show address & hours)
• Geo sitemap settings to submit to search engines

This looks like a handy plugin to use for many local and small business owners. See Joost’s how-to article for a preview.