Some businesses sell products or services to customers nationally or across the globe, but as a chiropractor, the majority of your business comes from residents in your local area. This makes it all the more important to focus your local SEO efforts on your local chiropractic business listings.
As you already know, the days of flipping through the Yellow Pages to find local businesses are long gone. Today, consumers turn to their laptops or smart phones to search for businesses in their local area. Thus, local business listings have pervaded the Web, and along with geo-targeting, the optimization of business listings is garnering more and more attention.
Local internet marketing experts are increasingly focusing their attention on local search engine optimization and local business listing optimization in particular. The trend towards local began not long ago, when Google began rewarding local business listings with first page results, and the trend is not going away anytime soon.
What are Local Chiropractic Business Listings?
A local chiropractic business listing is any reference of the name, address, and phone number of your chiropractic business on any number of local business directories, such as Yellow Pages. Local business listings can also be included on local chamber of commerce or local business association websites.
If you have a business website, then the listing should also have a link back to your website. Though the link helps direct more visitors to your site and bolsters SEO results, often the reference alone is enough to build the authority of your site.
Impact of Local Chiropractic Business Listing Optimization on SEO Results
Local business listings comprise a percentage of search engine ranking algorithms. Therefore, search engines like Google consider local business listings when determining the relevance of a web page for a search query.
When the explanation of this importance is simplified and all of the other factors that determine ranking are equal, one can reasonably assume that a business with more local business listings will rank higher in the search engines than a business with fewer local listings.
Similar to any other search engine authoritative ranking factor, the more established and authoritative the site is that your business listing is listed on, the more trusting the search engines are of your site and the more authority your site will be granted. This makes it extremely important to list your business in established and authoritative online business directories, such as YellowPages.com, that frequently appear at the top of search engines for local searches.
Local Chiropractic Business Listings Provide Businesses with Legitimacy
For a traditional brick and mortar business, a sign above the door gives the business legitimacy in the eyes of customers. In the world of the Internet, local citations and local business listings legitimize a business and its website in the peering eyes of the search engines. People may be able to write fake press releases and news stories, but posting these types of articles in legitimate news sites is difficult.
The same can be said with posting local business listings on legitimate online local business directories and chamber of commerce sites. These will not post fake business listings, so listing your business on them legitimizes your business and improves its search engine rankings.
As you have discovered by now, local business listings play a major role in the local SEO performance of your business website. In addition to submitting your business listings to as many authoritative online business directories as possible, it is also important to ensure the uniformity of all of your business information across all of the listings. This will aid the search engines in connecting all of you listings together and improving the search engine rankings of your business.