With universal search being on the rise, it’s clear that Google has an agenda. And, that agenda involves monetizing more of the search results pages. For example, look at any travel term with commercial intent.
But, in the arena of local search, Google hasn’t quite found a way to monetize that area while providing a quality user experience for their users.
Therefore, given that “universal search” is part of the “New SEO”, ranking in these blocks is ever-so critical.
There are many backlink and on-page factors that play into this area, apparently. But, there is one thing we do know that is very critical – citations.
Getting links from the right info sites is very important in order to gain the credibility in order to be a part of this area. Think of this search block as the “credibility block”. And, if you betray that credibility by having an influx of errors or – forbid – your site goes down for a week, it’s very hard to recover.
As you are building the credibility to be in this area, here is a short list of the sites that you need to be on in our to compete . And, you need to have listings – or, if applicable – local business profiles – on all of these:
- Google+
- Foursquare authentication
- Yelp
- Factual
- Superpages
- Infogroup
- Localeze
- Yellowpages
- Insiderpages
- Citysearch
- Best of the Web
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Hotfrog
- Acxiom
Being listed on all of these consistently is not a sure-fire way to the top of the SERPs. But, it is a necessary step, if you are going to compete.
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