We’ve learned to go to a search engine to find the answer to life’s lingering questions. Sometimes some of these searches aren’t life-changing – instead, they’re looking for basic windshield repair businesses in the local area. The problem that arises with asking these questions is that you’re consulting a search engine that’s optimized for giving the best results. But how do you define what “best “is? We’re here to help! Here’s how you can improve your online presence for local search results.

1. Make sure your local search results are complete.

Search engines are optimized to bring the recipient the best local search results. This means that local windshield repair businesses will want to make sure that their sites have local markers that point to their pages. These markers include area codes, zip codes, neighborhood names, suburb names, city names, addresses, and directions and maps. All of them are markers that tell the search engine that the business is local. This type of data should be present in many places on a website. Writing the city’s name in texts included in headlines and internal links is also helpful.

Local business should also make geographic links that point to their business. They can make this happen by adding local links and descriptions that point to their site in places like social media profiles.

2. Connect with the local community.

Content creation is a powerful tool that many successful businesses use. Not only does it direct more eyes back to them, but it also is a way to reach out to the local community. Businesses should consider creating content that’s related to their local community. Even if it doesn’t directly relate to their services or products, it will still paint a good picture of the business and help direct traffic. Businesses can do this by hiring a blog or content writer who will use a dedicated part of their website to create customer-friendly content that’ll help bring in customers and help build trust.

3. The creation of neighborhood pages.

This advice is especially helpful for basic windshield repair companies that serve a variety of communities within a larger metropolitan area. They’d add neighborhood or suburb-specific pages with additional information that’s personalized to each of the different parts of the city. Make the pages unique so that the search engines will see them as different pages. Making them too similar may cause the search engines to clumps them together or even consider them to be malicious. Zest things up with photos that contain local descriptions.

4. Windshield repair businesses should encourage customers and visitors to review and rate them.

This can be one of the most nerve-wracking aspects of running a business. Reviews and customer ratings are a double-edged sword. They can either be really good or really bad. Regardless, local search directories that are created by Bing, Yahoo, and Google play a huge role in local search results. Take for example Google’s approach; if the company’s algorithms are convinced that a person has a local intent in their search, Google will return results of local Google Places pages. Working behind the scenes, these types of occurrences are vital to a business’s claims. It also enhances its Yahoo Local, Bing Local, and Google Places pages. It is, however, up to the business to build reviews through satisfied customers on these pages. The reviews are the reason why a business will show up high in the local results.