After claiming your  Googles Local listing it’s time to get to work improving your position. Local search works a little differently than organic search. Your position among the local search results is determined in large part by feedback left by Google users.

Google Local ranks local businesses by gathering users’ feedback. As you see in the image above,  business listings on Google Maps have a ranking of 1-5 stars. If you perform a couple test searches you’ll see that most businesses are unranked.

Local search is driven by Google’s users. So the more reviews and feedback those users provide, the better chance you’ve got to be promoted in Google’s results. So the key to getting a higher local listing is to get people to leave feedback for your site and business on Google.

Getting Reviews

To leave feedback, users will need to be registered users- that is, they’ll have to have a free Gmail account. Then it’s just a matter of clicking on your search result and clicking the ‘write a review” link and leaving a star-ranking or writing a review.

Ask your customers to review you. Add a link on your site directly to the Google Local results, ask people to leave a review and good ranking. Just asking is good enough often, but a little something extra can be a great motivation. Offer a coupon, savings or other promotion to a good review.

There’s nothing wrong with writing the review and asking other users to copy and paste it into the form field. The easier you make it for your users, the more likely it is that they’ll be willing to help you out.

What stops your competition from leaving negative reviews?

Nothing at all.  That’s the downside of social marketing. Fortunately, negative feedback can help too. All feedback is beneficial to your position in the local results. While a negative review might scare some potential clients off,  but you’ll gain position in the search results.

Asking for, and encouraging reviews is about the easiest thing you can do to improve your local search results.  Search for your business now and see how you’re currently ranked. Try sending that link out to your satisfied clients and let us know in a comment here how it worked out.