Local rankings are one of the important aspects to increase your sales and traffic in 2013 with rise of Panda and Penguin, Some of the businesses like lawyers, plumbing etc are the ones which depends mostly on local customers. Today we will be discussing some of the great methods which can really help to increase your local search engine rankings.

Give Discounts to get reviews for your services: Offer discount on your local listing +1 page or any other social media, and in return you can ask for a honest review of your services, one of the most white hat method will be to ask review of your services as soon as your team finish the work at client place. Guest Blogs on Local industry blogs – Guest blog posting is 100% natural method of link building, You can search for local industry blogs, write a great post on your niche providing good information which should be useful for readers and approach those local business blogs to publish your blog, in this way you will get top quality incoming links from local trusted sites which will enhance your rankings as well as you will get direct business from readers. If you do not have time for all this hard work, you can always hire expert guest blogging services. Leave Thoughtful Comments on Local blogs/Forums : A lot is being said about comments or forums, but if you really take part in trusted local communities and leave thoughtful comments, you can even get great quality links as well those who are reading your comments can send direct business to you. You need to informative in all this process. Testimonials for Local Businesses: This is also great method to leave testimonial of local business on review sites with all the contact information and link back to your websites, Google and other search engines take notes of all these mentions, co-relations as well as determine locally relationship while ranking your business for local rankings. Claim your business listing on Google : Google places are free to claim your listing, and mentions of your business address with sitemap location as well local tags, can boost your local rankings in Google at rapid speed. If you do not have Google places listings, you are missing lot of traffic. Now you can also find Google Local in your Google+ page as they are part of Google Plus. Getting reviews in Local business directories or review/reputation sites: There are many trusted review sites as well local business directories. Best way to start is getting your business listed in Google Places as discussed, Yelp, Yahoo! Local Listings, Bing Local, Citysearch and Insider Pages etc. There are some great business reviews or reputation sites as well like TrustPilot etc; you will also find niche specific sites like Tripadvisor for travel. In addition to all these, each city or country always have local business directories where you can get your business listings and they are stamp of approval for Google and other search engines that you are based in that area and you should be ranked for the same.

If you have any ideas for any other off page methods for local rankings, you can leave in comments or send us directly