One of the best ways to attract new customers is to rank highly in local searches for your products or services. Google and Bing have their own proprietary search algorithms and serve up local results differently, so it makes sense to put effort into a wide variety of tactics to boost rankings in your region. Here are a few ways to be the top-ranked for business in your city:

• Optimize for mobile - According to Smart Insights, people search for certain industries more than others from their cell phones while out & about. If your business is in food & beverage, health, or automotive, over 60% of searches about your industry start on mobile. Since Google has started to penalize websites that aren’t optimized for mobile, it’s vital that you adjust your site to accommodate mobile visitors. The best solution is to make your site “responsive,” an industry term that means your site responds appropriately for the platform, whether desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

• Complete your local business profile in Google, Bing, Yelp, etc. - Google has their My Business service, Bing has Places for Business, Yelp has their own business portal for claiming your company’s page. Taking advantage of these free business listing services will ensure that potential customers will have the most current information available about your products and services. Many cities also have local niche directory services that should have free listing services (e.g. Team Dave Logan in Denver) that you can use to your advantage.

• Provide useful content for your local customers - Search engines want to see updated, relevant content on your website. That way, they know they can rank your site higher, thereby providing more benefit to their users. “Inbound marketing,” as this practice is known, seeks to find out what extended information a customer is looking for and provides them with blogs, videos, webinars about those topics. The more value you can provide to your local customers, the more traffic and links you get to that content, the higher you will rank for business in your city.

Becoming the top-ranked business is not easy, nor quick. It requires an investment in time and resources, but when you consider the return in customer growth and the benefit of local prominence, it can prove well worth the effort.

Use the Bigfoot Web SEO Score Tool to generate a report that you can use to tighten up your on-page SEO and create a task list that will put you on the road to becoming top ranked in business in your city.