Well, I think I can now legitimately call myself a webmaster! At least to those not in the know like we are here at WA. All of my local clients, including me, are on the first page of Google Local maps. Some in the A bubble spot, some in C and D and one in D AND G for separate keywords. I feel much more confident about doing local now and feel I can command better money from it. These first few I considered guinea pigs so didn't charge enough.

So now it's rinse and repeat time. One of the clients mentioned above only ranks in the A spot for one keyword phrase and he doesn't much like me messing with the content. So I've decided to create shorter blog posts for other keywords and see if I can get him ranked for two more keywords (or LSI) so he can dominate (I love that word as far as IM goes) the local market for all three keywords or phrases. He will probably want to pay me more if I do that!

In addition to using keywords properly in SEO, I find that site mapping is way more important than I at first gave it credit. I had some techy problems on one site and had a hard time getting Google to recognize the sitemap even though I checked and it seemed to be indexing. Well, yeah, the pages came up when I did a site index check but the site was not registering in G Places. So after Apina looked it over for me and got the sitemap working, (thanks again, Dean) the site popped up in the A spot on the local map.

I knew I was doing everything else right, including SEO, writing an SA article, and performing other backlinking techniques and was getting frustrated wondering why my efforts weren't working. They worked before on other sites! Once Dean fixed my sitemap problem the outcome proved my efforts weren't wasted. If I hadn't done everything I was told to do, the site wouldn't have gotten page one ranking locally even without a site map glitch. BTW...if you are using a plugin to create a site map, be sure to use a good one! (lesson learned, right Dean?)

I think another thing that really help Google + Local (Places) ranking is to set up separate Google and Google + accounts for the clients. My conclusion here is that the more you work with Google, the more Google works with you.

Okay, so now I'm off to rinse and repeat. Gotta get my own business site to dominate for more keywords too and just started a brand new site so lots of work to do there.

Thanks for listening and for all the sharing. You are all tops in my book!