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Making sure your business is easy to find is the number one key to
ensuring your success these days – especially digital marketing success. However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. The detailed process of helping your company stand out from your competitors can be both time consuming and difficult. However, Google My Business has helped local businesses gain more exposure and convert more local prospects into paying customers. This local listing platform helps to attract more consumers in the area who may be searching for your type of product or service. The problem is, there are still millions of local businesses that have not yet capitalized on this critically important marketing platform. All it takes to turn Google My Business into a profit machine is to complete your profile, add as much information as possible, and optimizing it for higher rankings. But most businesses struggle with that very first step, which is to complete your profile. Very few business owners are completing their profiles to 100%. However, if you want to get the best results, this step cannot be ignored. Here are a few tips to help you get started won the right path: Make Sure Your Business is Actually Listed Of course, before you can focus on getting a 100% score, you need to first make sure you’re listed on Google My Business. Type in your company’s name, address, or phone number into Google search and see if anything comes up. If so, you know you’re listed and you can proceed to completing and claiming it. If it’s not listed, you want to create a listing for your business as soon as possible. Filling Out Your Profile If you want to get a 100% score, you’re going to need to ensure that your profile is completely and accurately filled out. First, fill in all the required fields. This actually contributes towards a great bulk of your score. It includes fields such as: Your company name as used in your everyday real world business Your physical address Your local phone number Once you have the basics filled out, you get additional score points for listing: Your company website address Your company email address Hours of operation Payment methods Detailed description of your business Pictures and Videos Appropriate categories Strategic keyword placement … and more The good news is that it is really simple to see what you need to do to improve your score via the Google my Business dashboard. Simply log in and take a look to see what your next steps should be. This is indicated by the profile completion bar shown on the dashboard. Should you need help with anything, it may be best to get the help of a professional local marketing expert.
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The change from Google’s 7-pack, to a reduced 3-pack has had a major
impact on local SEO. Many businesses struggled to get featured when there were seven spots available. Now getting into the top three can seem like rocket science. The good news is that this goal is not impossible. However, it does take time, skills, and knowledge to get it done. Being seen by local consumers just as they’re searching for your type of product or service is the most targeted type of marketing known today. But getting there can be tricky unless you really know what you’re doing. To help you get started down the right path, here are three helpful tips: 1. Get more citations When it comes to ranking your local listing, one thing Google pays close attention to is how often a company is mentioned in other sources. In other words, it looks for “citations” to validate your business. A citation is a mention of your business name along with another piece of business information anywhere on the web – with OR without a link back to your website. The additional information could be your phone number, website URL, or physical address – combined or individual. In order to count as a citation, the information must be an EXACT match to the information on your Google My Business listing. Citations help prove to the search engines that you are a real company; therefore, the more of them you have from quality sources, the better your local listing rankings will be. 2. Add photos to your listings It’s no secret that consumers love photos. The more, high quality images you have on Google local listing profile, the more appealing it will be to potential customers. This goes farther than Google; Yelp has even published advice on how to optimize your business listings, claiming that photos make a massive difference. It even goes as far as to say that according to research from Review Trackers, consumers spent 2.5 times more of their time on listings that featured photos. 3. Get as many reviews as you can Reviews are an important part of getting noticed online these days. Consumers love writing reviews about businesses and they also like reading them. Google has taken note of this. It wants to promote the best local businesses and what better way to determine who those businesses are than through positive user reviews? If you want to really increase your rankings, encourage your customers to leave reviews whenever you can. Getting your business to show up on Google’s 3-pack is a lot more challenging than it was with the 7-pack; obviously, because there are less spots. The tips above will help, but you will need to continually keep up with local search changes and ensure all of your company’s information is listed correctly and updated going forward. Not only that, but make sure you make smart use of categories and strategic keyword placement within your profile to give it strength. |
AuthorVIPLEADZ Team. Archives
January 2019
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