Here are the step to take prior to your meeting to discuss Local Search Marketing.

• Go to your prospects sight and find out what they do and what some of their keywords are.

• Go to Google and enter the keyword along with the city and state and see who shows up.  Make a print out of their Google Places listing and the company that is in the top position.  There are usually three results displayed: Paid searches, local results and organic results (which display below the local results).  Our goal is to have them show up in all three spots.  The chances of your customer's link being clicked is 60% if they are showing up in one location and 90% if they show up in two or three spots so our goal is to get them in at least two spots.

• Using the Google external keyword tool type in the keyword and get all the related keywords.  Try the keyword and the city you are looking for.  If you don't  You can estimate the local search quantity by dividing the number of people in your metro area by the number in the United States (308 million).  Download this list as an excel file.  Take out the ones that are not related.  The results are how many people are searching for their product or service (approximately).
  

• (optional) Go to Spyfu and pull up your customer's and the top competitor's information.  It should give you a lot of information about each company.  There are some websites that do not pull up.  If you don't get any info, just go onto the next step.

• Go to get listed.org and type in the name of your prospect and the top search results and see how well they have done listing themselves in the local search engines.  We offer a free listing on Google and charge for the other listings, including listing them with about 100 other local directories.  The reason they need to do this is that Google pulls information from these sites and will rank them higher if Google knows that the information is good.

• Go to Google insights and type in a keyword.  It will give you terms that people are searching for.  You'll need to weed out the unrelated ones.

• Go to Wordtracker labs  and type in the keyword.  It will give you other ideas on words that people were using.
  

If you do this you will know:

• How many people are searching for services your prospect provides.
• Who is in the number one position and what their local listing looks like.  You want to see if they mention the highest search term or which search terms they have not included that you can add to your customer's listing.
  
• If your prospect or the number one listing has completed their local search listings.
• You will also know what search terms people are searching most.  Those are the ones that you want to make sure are included in their Google Places listing.

Day of the meeting.

You should now have all the information you need for the meeting.  I am assuming that the goal of the meeting is to get them listed in Google places or claim their listing. 

Start out the meeting by saying "Mr. customer the purpose of this meeting it to update your Google Places listing.  Google is actively trying to get local business like yours to update their information.  The reason is that they want to present accurate information to their customers on the millions of small businesses across America and they will reward you for helping them out by improving your ranking.

First I did some research that I thought you might be interested in.  Last month there were xxx number of searches for products and services that you provide.  I made a print out of your listing and the company currently getting most of the leads.  Our goal is to move you into a more prominent position.

To do that I'd like to start by updating your Google listing.  It will take up to 30 days for your new listing to take effect but normally we can help our clients get into the top position for local searches.  I have included a Word document that you can use to get the information you need to update their Google listing.  Prior to going in make a print out of their current Google Places listing and the person in the top position.