What Local Search Elements Should Cleveland Business Focus Most On?

Asking questions about things that matter to your business usually forms the basis of selection or rejection of an SEO company or expert. Your likely analysis system of an incumbent SEO expert or an SEO company is literally falling apart as you are too confused to see almost all of them having different or sometimes even contrary views. It is not their mistake and neither it is yours. With SEO, things are anyways quite speculative and local SEO goes a step beyond since this field in itself is new, very dynamic and in a manner concealed by Google and other search engines.

Whether it is a do-it-yourself for you or hiring a search engine optimization company, many of the things that you need to rely on are rather vague. If you would really like to do a complete x-ray of the industry views on local SEO, read this Bible on Local Search Ranking Factors. For others, here is a list of the most likely ones that you should focus on to see a benefit in terms on rankings and visibility.

1. Your Business Location: Glad I said. But this is so true. Everyday, we have to make clients understand that a web based business doesn't means that you can rank well in all the cities of all the states. If you REALLY have a business location in a city, add that information to your Google Places account, if you have multiple locations, add all of them and you stand a chance of ranking well when keywords are combined with those location names as modifiers.For example. Cleveland Real Estate Agent. 
2. Semantic Keyword Usage in Business Name: Many SEO companies and Local SEO experts would lead you to believe that keyword usage in business name=SPAMMY. Well that is not true. If you are Presti Bakery, then the word "bakery" comes there automatically. Similarly, if I ate at "Blue Point Grille", I ate a restaurant, so they can include the word restaurant and since they are one, it would never hurt them adversely. 
3. Business Category: This one is kind of tricky and lets you determine a primary defined category and other categories where keywords can be used. It is advisable that if a major portion of your business comes through one product or service, then to use that keyword and its variations as categories. For example, if you are a musical instrument seller but mostly only sell guitars, then focus predominantly on that keyword. This will help you develop that "bias" for a particular product and in enhancing the visibility for that market. 
4. Business Citations: This has directly been borrowed from the academic mansions which house research papers. The research paper which is cited most by others becomes more and more authoritative and hence more "findable" when a search is made against such a database for example at NCBI Pubmed. Citations help your business in leading the O pack results. Citations are like links in regular SEO and they refer to a consistent mention of your business name and location/phone/fax number etc. 
5. Complete Business Profile: Numerous examples exist of non claimed profiles ranking much higher than claimed ones. For those who joined late, Google Places lets you claim your business profile if it exists on Google Maps. This way you can put up more and more information about your business on Google Places. The main reason of having a claimed listing is to put more about your business like images, videos, work hours, payment acceptance methods and so on. An incomplete business profile is just like an unclaimed business listing. Better spend an hour or two update as much information as possible. 
6. Consistency of Business Data: Consistency is the buzzword for Google Places. Businesses are mobile, they shift, they pack and unpack. It is essential that addresses are updated and the claimed listing is the ONLY one which shows in the O pack results or even on a Place page search. (it looks like this). Duplicate Google Place listings should be deleted anyhow. Remember that we are NOT talking of removing the listing from the Google Maps but just from Google Place page. 'Delete' > 'Remove this listing from my Local Business Center account. Here is a link to SE Round Table's coverage on this. 
7. User Generated Content: Users tend to add photos and descriptions of their favorite places on Google maps. This kind of data always helps a business in ranking above other competitors. Also, the placeholder location on the map should be as accurate as possible. We have seen cases where inconsistency of this data has lead to a ranking decrease for some businesses.
8. Location proximity: For big cities like Cleveland, Akron and Columbus, a centroid is becoming less and less important. Imagine a visitor to Cleveland who is not staying in the downtown Cleveland area. They are bound to look for eating joints, recreation places and movie halls in THEIR vicinity and to rank businesses based on a Downtown location would be highly inaccurate. Though the condition is that the searcher should correctly specify her location. That is good news for businesses which are not located or cannot afford to be located near the city center. 
9. Sentiment About Your Business: Poor business practices, bad customer experiences DO affect the ranking of your business. If at the core of your business you have a failed product or appalling service or many unhappy customers, Google Places, as a recommendation engine, would shy from you and your business. SEO or local SEO can never be a solution for mistimes products, bad customer service representatives or abhorring business policies. 
10. Traditional SEO factors: Traditional search engine optimization factors like anchor text relevance, quality of backlinks,  number of backlinks, onpage optimization and domain age/authority too, play a significant role in Google O-pack placement. If you want to rank well for say "lawn mowers Akron", place those words in the title tag of your homepage, in the links that point back to your site and in the internal linking within pages. What perhaps doesn't matters sop much is the crawl depth of the site which means show many pages from the website are indexed in the search engine. One most important factor would be the domain age and site trust (which again comes with domain age and link popularity). 

Ultimately, your rank would be a function of your location, popularity and relevance and the fine mix of factor weights would differ from city to city, industry to industry and query to query. If above best practices are followed, chances are high that your business would attain higher visibility in Google 7 pack and on Google maps.