While being a small business owner, having your company put in the eyes of your potential customers is drastically important. After all, when considering how powerful modern-day search engines have become, the only way to have a leg up over your competition is to evolve along with technology. With Google My Business, you have the resources and tools to truly have your customers easily see your business’ website and information, right when they are looking for something similar! With My Business, your site is placed above the typically top ranked sites, usually when someone includes your business’ city within their searched keywords.

Why Use Google Local Listings?

With Google’s great local listings, you can easily target the right customers. If you receive the majority of business from local customers, then you may have figured out that search engines are VASTLY important with regards to your business’ success.

Higher Ranking

With Google Local Listings, your site will rank higher than the conventional top sites when someone searches for a city or location-based term, i.e. Texas burgers. So, this means that local listing searches will vary greatly from organic or pay-per-click results. The innate usefulness and necessity of having a local listing account should be absolutely self-evident, especially when considering that some studies have shown that over 50% of those who looked up a business from a local google search eventually visited that business. This means that having local listings is absolutely necessary!

How to Succeed With Local Listings

Have Accurate Information

When Google crawls your site, they look for inconsistencies with regards to your business’ information (address, phone numbers, map locations, etc.). If these are not accurate, they will penalize your business via search engine rankings. Considering this, please make sure you company’s name phone number, URL, etc. are exactly the same everywhere – offline and on. If not, Google may not even pick up on the fact that the two different names are actually the same company, thus hurting your business’ search results and Google position. Frankly, people will not be able to find your business if your information is not accurate.

Stay Relevant

Google wants to make sure that its customers get the best, most-relevant results possible. Because of this, you want to make sure your company or business stays relevant to your specific customer pool. How? Google crawls an extreme number of things to determine your company’s relevancy. These include:

• Categories like Yelp, Super Pages
• Homepage of your website
• Your business’ reviews

It’s important to make sure that your website is properly optimized and relevant to your business’ niche or customer base. If not, google could push your site farther down the rankings, thus hurting your bottom line – profits!

Reviews

While reviews of your business may help a small amount with regards to your Google ranking, having reviews for social proof within your online profile is massively necessary to draw in customers. Without social proof, your customers have absolutely no way to determine if your business will be satisfactory in their eyes, thus they decide to try somewhere else. Now, we are not saying to buy fake reviews, but nudging clients to leave reviews can greatly help your business’ online profile. Trust me, customer’s need social proof, and reviews give it to them!

Having an Effective Profile Picture

Many underestimate, or even forget, that customers will judge you off of your My Business profile picture. Your profile is the most-widely projected picture of your business that Google uses, thus is seen by a great deal potential customers. For these reasons, make sure to make to choose the best, most cosmetically appealing picture you have available to you. It may even be worth it to set up a photo shoot for this exact reason. Studies have shown that having a great profile picture can increase business traffic substantially, so make sure you keep that in mind.

Think About This…..

If your company is not a conventional business and you do not want customers randomly showing up at your location, you may want to hide your address on Google My Business. By doing so, you could save yourself the anguish of dealing with angry customers, as well as a substantial amount of time.

For a great video on how to do this, click HERE.

While many might think that it is not necessary to optimize your company with local listings, nothing could be farther from the truth. No time? Not very technologically inclined? It’s okay.

We can do this for you!!

Yes, you heard that right. We can do this for you in no time! Our SEO and small business experts are vastly experienced with regards to setting up your cherished company on Google My Business. With us, you could see an increase in sales, more online awareness, plus many more awesome benefits!

To contact us by phone, give us a call at:

813.360.0932

You can also always shoot us an email at:

info@foowebs.com

Trust me, we will take care of you!