With the current trend that the search engines have become the new Yellow Pages, Google, Yahoo and MSN have been altering their algorithms (a fancy word for how they determine who ranks for what and how high).   They are altering the algorithms to provide better local results. 

 Just 3 years ago trying to find a shoe store or gift store on a particular street in your town would usually yield maybe, 1 accurate result.  As more people began to search for local stores and businesses the search engines realized they had to improve their local search results and now they are competing to be the best as they know the site that provides the most relevant results could gain a serious edge in the searchers market share that Google dominates.  Google is trying to hold on to it and MSN and Yahoo are trying to capture it.

 Google has implemented the Google map results for local searches.  For instance, search for “carpet cleaning” in any city and you will get a list of results mapped on a mini map before the top 10 natural rankings.  So the question begs, where does your site show up for local searches. 

So how do you help your business to show up for local searches in addition to some good SEO. Make sure you are displaying a full address including zip code on your website along with phone numbers.  The search engines will use this information to map your business. 

Not only does this help but it also increases the “trust factor” for your website.  Search Engines are moving away from companies that hide behind contact forms and no direct address or phone number so having your full address and phone numbers will help to show the search engines that you are a legitimate, reputable business. 

 Home based business may want to consider a box office or an executive rental to ensure you have an address on your site, but don’t include your home address on your site for your own safety.

 In addition to this you need to make sure your site is appropriately optimized for your most related keywords and city name. 

This will help to ensure you are optimized for local searches.  Nothing complex, but you may want to consider having an SEO company optimize your pages if you aren’t comfortable doing this for yourself to ensure that it’s done properly and ethically.

One question you may not have thought to ask is “Who is doing my SEO work”? A dirty little secret that many SEO companies hide is that they actually farm out their work offshore or to other companies.

Troll through the postings of any of the big freelance websites such as Get A Freelancer, Elance, Guru and the many others and you will find many postings that read like this:

We are a web design company in Canada. We are looking for one or more SEO partner companies to whom we can send work, and build a long-term relationship.

or

We are a consulting firm looking to sub contract our SEO work.

or

We are a web developer and  will be providing a number of customers with SEO services and would like to strike up a relationship with an Indian or Pakistani based SEO company.

So the questions begs…who is doing your SEO work?  Are you paying high prices with a company only to have them send the work off shore at a fraction of the cost. 

Off shore optimization also presents quality issues that the company would need to make sure they stay on top off.   Meta Tags and content may be written by someone who’s first language is not English resulting in poorly written tags and content, lower quality links like forum and blog postings are typically used which provide quick short term results but hurt a site in the long run.

If a company is outsourcing their SEO work than there are some things you need to judge:

• Are they outsourcing only menial tasks and are they telling the company what to do?
  Why this matters: If this is the case they are in control and are outsourcing tasks that are time consuming like link building, but as long as they are incontrol of what link building is being done that this isn’t too bad.
• Are they outsourcing all tasks and do they seem knowledgeable in SEO?
  Why this matters: If they are outsourcing all tasks this is a sign that they don’t know much about SEO, start asking questions about what methodologies they use, where they build links, what tools they use.  If they can’t answer the question without specifics and speak more in generalities (i.e. “we use the most popluar keyword research tools available” instead of  “we use Word Tracker”) than you can easily deduce that this company doesn’t know enough to manage and choose a proper outsourcing company and is only in it for the money it brings in.

Don’t pay premium prices for a North American, UK or Australian company if you aren’t sure where the work is coming from, ask them if any portion of the work is outsourced and judge accordingly if you feel the value is worth their cost or not.