Hey to everyone out there in Pomona California and the surrounding area. I just wanted to go over a couple local SEO tips for you guys to help you get better visibility hopefully outrank some of the competition in the Pomona area and some good SEO best practices. Now what I’m talking about here is getting ranked high in the local map pack. 

So if we hop back over to this in a moment, if we go over and let’s say we do a search for doctors in Pomona California. This is what we call the local map pack. Here now ideally if you’re a doctor you want to rank up in one of these top three spots. Now in order to get there google uses three or checks three different ranking factors. In order to get the most appropriate um results in the top results now what they are is relevance, distance, and prominence. 

So we’re going to go ahead and go over all three of those things uh just to let you know some things you can do and some best practices to boost these three things to get you hopefully ranking in those top three spots 

Relevance to local Pomona searches.

now relevance this refers to how well a local business profile matches what someone is searching for. That comes down to doing some good keyword research, and making sure you’re optimizing your google my business profile and your website as well for the types of searches that people are doing locally for your product or service. Now this comes down to a couple things that I would encourage you to do. 

I’ll go ahead and use my google my business profile as an example just to show you guys. 

One thing you want to make sure you optimize is your main business description. This is the info that you put out that gives a little synopsis of what your business is, and some of the strong points why someone should choose you. This is something that you want to make sure you get the right keywords in there and you want to make this generally good robust content. Anyways, don’t put a bunch of fluff in there. Make sure the content is quality. 

Also because I’m a service provider I have my services here as well. You want to make sure that you fill these out completely. Get the right keywords in there as well. Basically the more places that google offers you to describe your business and what you have, you want to make sure that you’re utilizing those. A lot of businesses don’t put the simple time and effort into doing this which is a big negative on their part. I encourage you to do that. 

As a little side tip something you can do along with posting regular photos of your business and your products and services, also something you can do is you can geotag your photos which actually has been shown through a bit of testing to help improve your your local rankings

Distance (Proximity) to the local search

Let’s get back over here now. Distance. So distance considers how far each potential search result is from the location term used in the search. This is something you don’t have too much control over, but basically how far you are from what the searcher is searching. Let’s go back to our doctors example. Now let’s click on the map. so this is basically going to give us all the doctors, the most relevant doctors to Pomona. Basically the center of Pomona. Obviously if you’re searching for doctors in Pomona you’re probably not going to get doctors that pop up in San Dimas or Claremont or anything like that because what google is thinking is that you’re searching from the heart of Pomona so it wants to give you the most relevant results to how close you are. So that’s something to keep in mind. Now also to note here is depending on how competitive the market is will determine how big the search area generally is. You can see that we have a lot of concentration here because there’s a lot of doctors in Pomona so they’re going to be concentrated here. Now if we do something like colleges there’s obviously not as many colleges as there are doctors in Pomona so they’re not going to be as concentrated. If you have someone looking for a coffee shop over near the Pomona Fairplex you’re probably not going to get a bunch of coffee shops that show up over near Upland or Claremont or anything like that. So distance is something to keep in mind, but again you don’t have too much control over that/

Prominence of local searches in Pomona CA

Now this third one is prominence. This can take a bit more effort to optimize for. This refers to how well a business is known. So obviously things like brand names, and landmarks, museums,

hotels things like that are going to be much easier to show in local results. If someone’s searching for “hotel in Pomona”,  probably a well-known brand name hotel is going to show up. 

There are ways if you don’t have a strong brand name or anything like that that can help build your prominence. Prominence is something that you can intertwine with domain authority. This is how authoritative your website is in the eyes of google. This comes down to things like quality

backlinks, when it comes to your local business this is how many quality directories you’re

listed on, citations. Meaning your name address and phone number which all need to be accurate and consistent across all the directories where it’s listed and shown. Also on websites where it might be shown. 

Also reviews, so the more reviews and the more positive reviews you have the better. Just a little side tip is that you want to make sure that you’re responding to these reviews as it is a good SEO practice. A lot of people don’t respond, and that is a negative ranking factor for local searches. Be sure to respond to your reviews.

Just having good overall SEO best practices for your website. You don’t want low site speed. You want to have robust, quality content. If you have a bunch of dumb content on there that gets high bounce rates, they come to your website and don’t want to be there anymore, that’s a negative ranking factor so just implement good SEO best practices for your GMB profile and your website. 

Again you want to make sure that you have these three things in line: relevance, distance, and prominence.

If you optimize for those you’re going to do pretty well, and hopefully get you out ranking the competition and get you high ranking in that local map pack for Pomona.  In the meantime everyone hope that helps a bit, and take care.