Experts Blog

Local Search Tips for Canadian Businesses

By Mary Bowling on May 31, 2012 - 02:27 PM

While those of us in the US are often clueless about what's going on north of the border, SEO's working to promote Canadian Businesses via Local Search are acutely aware of the unique challenges they face. Hopefully, this post will help the rest of us understand Local Search in Canada a little better.

Dot Com or Dot Ca?

If you have a business that is marketing strictly to Canadians, then dot ca is the way to go with your domain name. Nothing more clearly tells the Search Engines that you are marketing to searchers in Canada.

If you also market in other countries, a dot com domain name will serve you better in most instances. However, don't ignore a dot ca domain. You'll want to own that version of your domain, too, to protect your branding.

Public domain name registration, rather than private, using your Canadian address, will add some credence to your location trust, as well.

Where to Host

If you are using a dot com domain, it's probably best to host it on a Canadian server to give it a little more location trust. But if you are using a dot ca domain name, then it's okay to host it anywhere. Just make certain that you set your location in your Webmaster Tools account to Canada.

Trusted Data Providers

Infogroup and Acxiom both play a role for Canadian business, but the major data providers for businesses north of the border are Industry Canada , a government directory, and the YellowPagesGroup. There are dot ca versions of some popular local directories that feed info directly to Google Places, as well many local Canada-only directories.

With the help of prominent Canadian SEOs, Darren Shaw and Jim Rudnick, David Mihm recently released a Canadian Local Search Ecosystem chart. This allows us to visualize the data sources for Local Search in Canada and get a feel for how the business information flows across the web. You won't go wrong getting listed in as many of the directories revealed by their research as possible.

Canadian Directories

Citations are just as important for Google Maps in Canada (Maps.Google.CA) as they are elsewhere. The more trusted web pages that list the standardized name address and phone number for your business, the better. Many dot com directories have Canadian sections and/or allow Canadian business to list on them. In addition to those, here's a list of Canada-specific directories to help you get started with your citation building:

  • Canpages.com
  • Ca.Local.Yahoo
  • Yellowpages.ca
  • Yelp.ca
  • MerchantCircle.ca
  • WebLocal.ca
  • ShopinCanada.com
  • ZipLocal.ca
  • Hotfrog.ca
  • WhitePages.ca
  • 411.ca
  • Where.ca
  • BestoftheWeb Canada section
  • eSourceCanada.com
  • Goldbook.ca
  • CanadianWebDirectory.ca
  • GoPro.ca
  • FindHere.ca
  • SafeandTrusted.com

Canadian Local Search Tools

WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder

One of the best tools for Local Search is one home grown in Edmonton, Alberta - Whitespark.ca's Local Citation Finder.  It works on the same principal as link hub finders and also includes additional useful features.

You first set up a project with Canada as the county and select a city or town and then search by keyword phrases. The software scrapes the phone numbers of the top ranking local businesses in Google for that term and then looks across the web for those phone numbers.  The resulting citation sources can be viewed for each individual top ranker or as a consolidated list, making it easy to see the websites on which you may wish to try to get your own business listed.

Many of the good citation sources you find will be dot com domains, but try to get listed on as many good dot ca domains that appear in your results as you can, too.

The tool also helps you to find your own citations, find citations that need to be updated, keeps track of where you are already listed and helps alert you of citations that have dropped out of the Google index.

Google Category Tool

If you didn't already know that Google Places enables different categories to choose from in different countries, you know it now.  Mike Blumenthal's simple Google Category Tool allows you to see which ones are used where. For Google Places Canada, you can view the preset categories in both English and French.

Search Events and Conferences in Canada

One of the best ways to learn more about search engine marketing is by attending a good conference. You'll come away with a brain packed full of new ideas and gain validation for many things you already suspect, and a to-do list a mile long. Best of all, you'll get the opportunity to meet new people and gain colleagues and that help you build a network of knowledge and support that will serve you well into the future. Yes, these things can get expensive, but in my opinion, it will pay off for you if you make the effort to network and learn. Some of the best sessions I've attended over the years were ones that were only of marginal interest-they really opened my eyes to new ideas that I hadn't been paying any attention to.

Here are the organizations that frequently hold search engine marketing conferences in Canada:

  • SearchMarketingExpo.ca
  • Sempo.ca
  • SESConference.com/Toronto
  • AimConference.com
  • InternetMarketingConference. com

Canadian SEO Bloggers

These are a few of my favorite bloggers who specialize in Local Search in Canada: