How to be First Business in Google Local Search Results?

[LonestarG]

Yes Citations are important, specially when you are getting them from High Ranking Directories, but what are the other practices?
- what if you have multiple service locations? How to optimize your website for it? Creating Pages? what else?
- How does hummingbird treat the results?
what are the main reasons a business gets number 1 in local search results, reviews? and how google sees the fake reviews?
- Is Yelp reviews somehow working towards that?

[Amazingeggnog920]

Whilst this article does not explain everything it shows the basics of optimizing for such results. From going as local as possible including ZIP codes etc. Its an old article but worth a read through.

[Gene]

What market are you in? Some are obviously more competitive than others and thus harder to rank for.

Google changes so much that I wouldn't rely on SEO as much as most people say you should. Getting out of the scope of your question, but ever consider Adwords? This way you will be at the top of the results. Yes it cost money, however, if you have your funnel set up right, it won't really cost you anything at all.

The person who is willing and able to spend the most to acquire a customer wins. Sounds counter-intuitive, but it's 100% correct.

Since it's not what you asked about, I won't add more. But if you'd like to hear more, just let me know.

[george]

Well there are several ways:

Website name. Name your website related to how someone may search. Like if you own a business called 'adept productions' name the site 'adept productions - videography in London'

Meta tags. Make sure your meta tags have every word someone may use if they were looking for your business.

Website description. Try putting your name and a couple word description of what you do into there. Be careful not to spam the description with the same thing though

Keeping an up to date site map. Make sure your site map is up to date (like if you've added new pages etc.) and make sure you submit them to the search engine like google. It helps google push your site more and allows all of your pages to be listed.

Hope it helps!

[Jake]

Google placs is certainly a different science, although citations and reviews were the biggest facior at one time, I understand that the ranking of the main company site may now be the biggest places page result ranking factor, so conventional seo applied to the main site may pay off. One small florist in my city which is the #1 local result took no special measures to gain that position, but it has been in business for 50 years, (age is one of the etoucger factors to manipulate so it might weigh heavily)