I was recently asked about the different results on a search for a local business in Yahoo!. Below I break down a little bit the three main sections of a search, it’s the same for Bing and Google as well.
There are three sections to the Yahoo! search results when searching for a local business, let’s use the example, ‘web design near homer, ak’:
- The sponsored results (paid results on the top and the right of the search results page)
- The local results (the results near the top with the map to the right with the orange marks)
- The organic search results (the rest of the results which are the standard results you get from any search you make)
Sponsored Results
To get on the sponsored results you need to start a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad campaign with Yahoo, the site can be found here. If you do start a PPC ad campaign with Yahoo, it would also be a good idea to start one with Google and Bing as well. Bing adcenter is here and Google’s is here.
PPC campaigns allow you to pay to be on the top of the search results, the cost of the campaigns is dependent on how many other businesses are paying to be in the sponsored results area as well. It’s a bid system so the more competition there is the more it drives up the cost. Once there, you pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on your link. For a very local search the cost will probably be minimal, around $.10 per click on Yahoo!, Google’s PPC is often a fair bit more expensive as more people use it. The higher your bid the higher you’ll rank within the sponsored results.
The Local Results
You can’t pay to get on the top of the local results, this must be done by having a good local page with relevant information, through getting reviews on that page from customers and being ‘mentioned’ more around the Internet.
The more positive reviews you get the higher you’ll rank. The $9.95/mo. payment that Yahoo! offers for their ‘enhanced’ listing MAY help with this a little only because it allows you to add more information to your local page listing, however, it also very well may have absolutely no effect on the ranking.
Getting ‘mentioned’ around the internet also helps with the local results. This is done mainly by creating a listing at all the local directories you can find, such as Yelp and MerchantCircle. (We can get you listed at over 50 directories for $199, we manually submit all listings to ensure accuracy, we don’t use any automated software, nor do we outsource the work. Contact us for more information.)
Organic Search Results
You can’t pay for higher ranking here either. To get ranked here you must optimize your website for the search terms you want to get ranking for (I will do this for the home page of you site) and, among other things, you must get other sites to link to yours. Getting good reviews and getting listed on local directories such as Yelp will also help your organic search rankings.
Proper home page optimization will help but other off-site actions must be taken, such as getting those links to your site, to really make sure you get high ranking. If your website has been around a while you may have a decent Page Rank (a value from 0-10 assigned by Google to each website, it gives an overall trust level of that website and will give a fair indication of how well you will do with your chosen search terms, such as ‘Alaska web design’), you should really try to get your PR to 4 for best results, 2-3 is most common though. Head to www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.phpto check the PR of your site.
To get the most of your website, it’s important to work on all three of the above topics, for all three major search engines. The organic search results will go up for all the search engines when links are created, listings are created in various directories and customers leave reviews. The other two must be handled separately with each search engine.
It’s very important to remember that there’s no silver bullet for getting ranking, it takes time and work, either by you or someone you pay to do it for you. If it were easy everyone would do it.
Tags: Marketing, PPC, SEO, Visibility