Those of you who know me know that I LOVE local search. I talk about it in my classes all of the time. The reason I love local search so much is that there are so many ways to monetize local search results. You can easily find a local company that needs your services and will often be willing to pay monthly for a website and ranking, or you can find a number of companies that would be happy to have their banner on a ranking site.
How I monitor for local search
When I start a new website I always monitor raking on the first three to five pages of the search engines, usually Google, Bing and Yahoo. I do this so I have an idea of what’s popping up and what isn’t. After I start ranking I only monitor page one. One of the other really nice things about local search is that it’s generally easy to stay on top once you’ve gotten there. You have to love that.
Today I’m going to use a website that I’ve just really started as an example. It’s a site that I’m doing for a local tattoo company. It has almost no content right now because that’s how many local companies are. They want the site now but don’t really want to have to do any work to get it there. That of course can cause quite the challenge to the guy trying to get it ranked.
What I usually do is get the website up, get it ranked for local search and then tell the company “Look here, your site is ranking and getting traffic 
but you’re not getting any business from it because I don’t have your information.” That usually helps get them moving along.
So the website is http://fortcollins-tattoo.com/, and it’s actually a fairly competitive local niche. There is almost no content on the website at all as you can see in the picture here. But it’s even worse. The site was left in a horrid state because I got suddenly sick and was hospitalized for a week. You can see I started an article on Ankle tattoos but never got the article itself posted because I got sick literally while getting this site going. So the results you’ll see are from letting this local search site sit in this state for a week.
Letting this local search site sit without any real work
I have done literally NO off page work on this website other than a quick ping. The results you will be seeing are after leaving the website site half done for a week without even any real on page work done, at least without focusing on it.
You can see the local search results for the tattoo site here.
Update
After looking at the terms I was ranking for I decided to start edging my way into more competitive terms, the ones that are really getting the traffic. For me, once I can make it into the SERPS, especially local SERPS, I find it easy to start tuning based on website copy.
So I made of few small changes to copy and have gotten the following results below.
So now I’m making some traction for the real competitive terms, which is where I want to be. Again, I’m still doing this without any REAL content on the website and I still haven’t added any articles. Basically I’m priming the pump. Once I start adding SEO based content I will be dominating this local search market and niche.
Update 2
Not even a week later. I finally got some content from the fellas at the shop and started to actually create a “real” website. All of these changes were made yesterday and Google is still caching some results from November 2nd, which was 15 days ago. But we are doing well none the less.
The yellow highlighted words are the ones that I am really trying to rank for. While it’s all well and great to rank for the others also, I used those primarily to “get the ball rolling”, priming the Google so to speak. Still waiting for Bing and Yahoo to kick in. I generally allow those to show up naturally.
Update #3
This is about 8 hours after update 2. Many of the changes I made today for Fort Collins Tattoo are starting to show in the local search as can be seen below.
Now the real interesting thing here is that there is even more to the story. I did a little article marketing and bookmarking to back it up, it really doesn’t take much for local search.
So if we take one of the searches above (Fort Collins Tattoo Designs) and pull it in in Google this is what we see.
Our website is the first two in the local search, but the rest are either articles or bookmarks that I made to back the website up. Meaning all of those links lead back to our tattoo website.
This one is interesting also.
tattoo design fort collins
Again, all of those link are us! The top one is our website and the rest are all either articles (on blogs) of the social bookmarks of our website or the articles. Is there any wonder that I love local search?
How about another update, close to a week later and some promoting
We will focus on the same keyword just so it’s apples and apples. So it’s “tattoo design Fort Collins”
The following screen shots are page one, two and three of Google results for the term. Everything in the highlighted box are either our money site or properties I created that lead back to our primary money site.
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
To smmarize what you are seeing here.
We own all but one position (#5) on page one.
We own all but 3 positions (#6, #8, #10) on page two.
And all but 1 position (#3) of the top six on page three.
We built two nearly identical websites in the SAME NICHE.