Local SEO Tips
Google My Business
In short, Google My Business is a place where businesses can get themselves a robust and feature-rich online listing for free. When you create a business listing on Google My Business, you’ll have the opportunity to provide information about your business, photos, and more. Users will be able to leave reviews for you. And as an administrator, you’ll also get to see statistics about your visitors and the searches that they’ve done to bring them to your page. But all this is only going to be seen if your visitors can find the page.
And there are essentially three factors that influence rankings on local search results, relevance, proximity, and prominence. Relevance is all about how well your business listing matches a user’s search query. In most cases, the more complete and accurate a business listing is, the easier it is for Google to properly understand your business and return its listing in local search results. The second factor is proximity. Local searches are by definition bound to a geographic location, and Google uses what it knows about where a searcher is physically located, including mobile location services, or location terms in the search query.
It then attempts to return the most relevant result based on listings in that specific area. Finally, the prominence of the listing has an effect on how well it will rank. Prominence is a measure of how well known your business is across the web, and much like regular content pages, it looks for evidence around the web that others are talking about you. Things like links, citations, reviews, articles, blogs, social activity, directory listings, and any other mentions about your business are all considered.
And generally, the more positive these mentions of your business are, the better. To get started with Google My Business, you’ll need to visit google.com/business. And as you go through the process, here are a few tips. First, it’s a good idea to create a separate Google account to manage your listings, and this account should be tied to your corporate domain. Something like, local@yourdomain.com, will keep your business account tied to the business and separate from your personal account. If you and the organization you’re working for ever decide to part ways, this separation can save you a lot of headaches later on.
Next, it’s important that you don’t try to stuff keywords into your company name or details to try to get a higher rank. Remember, consistency across your citations is extremely important to local search rankings, and this can hurt you, and it’s against the terms of service. Since consistency is so critical, it can be helpful to ensure that there’s a single default you’re using everywhere you can. One trick is to write out the business name, address, and phone number once in a text file that’s stored somewhere that anyone doing this kind of work can access.
And when you’re updating citations, you can just copy and paste the information from that document exactly to minimize the chances of the information being inconsistent or incorrect. Generally, you’ll want to provide as much information as you possibly can throughout your listing. Take the time to enter in your operating hours, the payment options that you accept, and don’t forget to add photos or video if you have it. Remember, potential customers are searching on the go and if they can quickly see that what you offer meets their needs, know for a fact that you’re open at a particular time, or accept a credit card that’s in their wallet, that might be enough to bring them to your door instead of your competitors.
Last, once your listing is online, you’ll want to make sure to keep it updated and relevant. And you can always come back to edit it or add photos, videos, or anything else that hasn’t already been added to the listing. You should be monitoring your reviews and make sure to respond to any negative items, and thank your positive reviewers regularly. The more you tell Google about your business, the easier it will be for the search engine to understand what your business is about and place you appropriately in the search results.
And the more detail you can provide in your listing, the better chance you’ll have of convincing customers to walk through your doors.
Foundations of a Successful Local Marketing Strategy
Monitor your listings for new reviews, and respond as quickly as possible to negative feedback. Most of us enjoy receiving positive feedback, but it’s especially important to be alerted by negative reviews left by dissatisfied customers. responding to these reviews in a timely manner can sometimes change the reviewer’s mind about his or her experience.
Keep in mind that your primary audience for these review responses should be prospective customers who come across your comments when considering a future purchase. A calm compassionate response that owns up to the reviewer’s perceived problem is more likely to win you future customers than one that blames or belittles the reviewer.
Implement a review solicitation program. As our friend John likes to say There are two kinds of businesses , one with a bad review and businesses that will get a bad review. don’t wait to get a bad review before you start reaching out to happy customers as part of a reputation management program. to have a proactive customer feedback system in place to fit customer service issues before they make it out onto social media and to make sure that reviews from happy customers paint the unhappy ones as outliers.
Strong review profiles can greatly enhance the appearance of your listings. They can also improve the frequency and breadth of keywords on which they appear and convert more of the customers who see these profiles.
Analyse your reviews on a regular basis. Once you start analysing reviews across your complete portfolio of locations, you’ll gain insight into which locations are performing well and which need help and where certain managers or employees may need training on how to improve their customer service. occasions with weak review profiles might also need a little extra help from other marketing efforts to prevent them from underachieving in overall digital customer acquisition.
Customer reviews are a critical piece to help your local SEO perhaps the critical piece of the consideration phase of the local purchase funnel. According to a recent consumer survey by right local star ratings are the factor used by consumers to judge a business and 8% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations.
There’s also plenty of anecdotal and empirical evidence to suggest that reviews impact rankings in at least two major ways businesses with review counts exceeding a certain market- and industry-dependent threshold consistently rank higher than the majority of businesses below that threshold and the keywords consumers use in their reviews often influence which businesses show up for those keywords.
Our suggestions for making the most of customer reviews your listings for new reviews, and respond as quickly as possible to negative feedback. Most of us enjoy receiving positive feedback, but it’s especially important to be alerted by negative reviews left by dissatisfied customers. responding to these reviews in a timely manner can sometimes change the reviewer’s mind about his or her experience.
Keep in mind that your primary audience for these review responses should be prospective customers who come across your comments when considering a future purchase. A calm compassionate response that owns up to the reviewer’s perceived problem is more likely to win you future customers than one that blames or belittles the reviewer.
Implement a review solicitation program. As the saying goes there are two kinds of businesses A businesses with a bad review and businesses that will get a bad review. Don’t wait to get a bad review before you start reaching out to happy customers as part of a reputation management program. Keep up a proactive customer feedback system in place to fi customer service issues before they make it out onto social media and to make sure that reviews from happy customers paint the unhappy ones as outliers.
Strong review profiles can greatly enhance the appearance of your listings. They can also improve the frequency and breadth of keywords on which they appear and convert more of the customers who see these profiles.
