Looking ahead to 2013, much of the Internet marketing buzz is circulating around local search. This is great news for local small businesses, because it means that the small guys can finally get some love from search engines!

One of the best ways to ensure that local customers and businesses recognize your brand is to focus on local online business listings. These listings not only provide valuable links to your site (hence, improving the page rank as well as authority of your site) but also present the opportunity to add business details, hours, and photos to pages potential customers are browsing right now!

Tackling local search listings can be painfully difficult. It requires times, diligence, and patience to go through several steps, verify passwords, email and even phone calls. However, these steps will pay off. And, there's good news. We found a great tool that will help alleviate some of the local search frustration.

getlisted.org

This site does a lot of the leg work for you. Simply enter the name of your business as well as the local zip code, and the site will review all of the listings across the Internet. It will then provide you with a list of all of the listings in which your site appears.  More importantly, though, is the fact that this list also specifies which listings you have claimed and which listings are still hanging out on the web without your ownership. Furthermore, under each listing is a convenient link that takes you straight to the page to verify the listing if you have yet to do so!

For more information on optimizing your small (or large!) business for local search, we recommend reviewing Neil Patel's lengthy yet valuable article, here.  For more information on an integrated Internet marketing campaign, check out our Blue Archer services here. Small business on a small budget? There are plenty of ways to stretch your small biz dollar.

How do you implement your local search tactics to ensure awareness in your community online? We'd love to hear your comments below.