If your business has at least one physical location near to a city, then you’re going to want to take all the virtual real estate in local searches that you can.

Being on top of the local search food chain can allow you to find new customers, reach customers you might otherwise miss and even steal some of the profits from your competition in some of the most cost efficient ways you’ve ever seen.

Here’s five tips to increase your business’s local search rankings.

1. Claim Your Place

It should go without saying, but you won’t see many benefits to your local search ranking on Google, Yahoo! and Bing if you aren’t listed on them.

Each website has a different process that you have to follow to ensure that your website gets listed. Ensure that you have detailed information about your business’s location on an “About” page with an interactive map located nearby.

2. It’s All About Location, Location, Location

There’s two things that make up a local search term. You have one part that is the actual keyword and the other that’s the location of your business.

When you’re creating content and other pages, ensure that you make pages specifically about your customer’s searched keywords while using in natural-sounding keywords that describe the location of your business.

3. Grab Links from Local Websites

One of the fundamental principles of search engine optimization remains that you need to grab powerful links back to your website from other sites. While it seems obvious for global searches, it also holds true for local searches.

Earn back links to your business’s website from local organizations and local search directories. Don’t be afraid to reach out to these websites, to offer a sponsorship or donation, to earn a link back to your website or mention.

4. Local Events Make for Great Local Content

Blogging and writing about local events that pertain to your business is a great way to bring in extra visitors while creating fresh content based around a location keyword. Or find out how your business can participate in the invent as a sponsor or exhibitor.

You can then link your business from these event pages to create strong supporting pages that will ultimately work to boost your website’s local search rankings.

For an added bonus, you can receive extra points from search engines like Google if you can then get people to talk about your events using social media. This can help keep your event pages just as relevant in local searches as your business’s main page.

5. Multiple Locations? Make Multiple Pages

Many businesses have multiple branch locations. If this is the case, you should focus on creating multiple location pages for each branch that you want to promote.

Include things like customer reviews, staff information, name, address, phone number and store hours by using structured data. If there’s a unique type of merchandise that is only carried at a certain location, then make sure to write about it on the pages of those locations.

This will allow you to pull in more visitors from a wider array of results while fortifying the ranking of local searches including your business in their results.

Local Search Success: Putting It All Together

Reaching the top of local search results is generally easier than it is trying to reach the same place in global search results. The difference in succeeding with local searches is ensuring that you have the right amount of content that focuses on location-specific keywords.

It’s worthwhile to do so. You may even find that it’s more beneficial than trying to climb the global search ladder, considering that it can bring in walk-in customers whom may otherwise never have known about your business.