The impact of not working with local business marketing manifested themselves very blatantly today when I tried to book a table at my local curry shop. We have used them fairly frequently and always had a lovely meal. On two occasions they even agreed to open especially for us to serve Sunday lunch... but we were the sole patrons.

The main cause of their decline came from the fact that they were virtually undetectable on line - whether the search was made from a PC or a mobile phone.

Because my own area of expertise is local business seo, I asked him what his strategy was for advertising the restaurant both on the web and off but he assured me that he had everything organised.

A few short months after this conversation, we could not get through on the phone when we wanted to book a table. Driving down to find out the problem, the restaurant was quite clearly no longer serving. The sign outside had been taken down and the fittings removed.

So just what exactly could he have done?

I have never understood why individuals will spend several hundred pounds on an entry in a directory that does not show up on the front page of Google for the keywords that are relevant to their market. Free entries in local listing directories are normally the most suitable option because you can maximise on their domain authority to boost your own listing..

Keyword research should be at the heart of any local business SEO to help Yahoo and google match your website with its search queries. So, prior to beginning doing anything via the internet, you have to think about what your probable purchasers are really going to be typing directly into Bing and Google to try to find you

When you have your list of 'keywords', these should be incorporated into the infrastructure of your web site to maximize all Local SEO (the abbreviation for search engine optimisation) opportunities. If you tell Google and bing that your website is about search term phrases that people are actually on the lookout for and offer relevant information about those keywords, the search engines are a lot more likely to match up any requests with a internet site that it knows will answer them

Get on Google First Page - Places listings

In 2011, Google changed the way they decide who is going onto their first page and began giving local businesses an advantage. They had recognized that most people buy from a business that is within a five mile radius of their own location and, as their ambition is to offer the most helpful and relevant information to answer any search query, the machine had to keep pace with what humans needed.

Google exploited this new knowledge by opening their own free local directory called Google Places Pages. To begin with they scraped the records from the established internet directories and even now they will occasionally utilize data from those places if they feel the entry that you have created is lacking. The leading seven of these pages sit prominently on the first page of the SERPs for certain locale centered keywords making the amount of room for organic entries much less.

This inclusion of the seven new Google Places entries on the first page of their SERPs (search engine results pages), Google had reduced the amount of room that was available for the other organic entries.

The result of this is that local organisations and businesses now have three chances at getting seen on the front page of Google - in the organics with their own internet site or as a free directory listing or as one of the seven Google Places Pages, providing they have made the effort to fill out all the details properly in all the places that they can do it for no cost.

I just wish my local curry house had known.