By Steve Seeberg –
Rise to the Top of Local Google Search Results for Your Services at No Cost
Google offers a free listing service for local businesses called “Google My Business”. Businesses that take full advantage of this listing service by providing the content Google suggests, plus reviews and continuous status updates ( “Posts”) are able to achieve top-of-the-list, first page ranking in a relatively short period of time.
Stop Competitors from Taking Away Valuable New Business Opportunities
As of early this years, over 60% of small businesses have taken advantage of Google My Business pages to achieve top or near top, first-page ranking on local searches. First-page, top ranking assures you of generating more new business than your competitors with lesser or no ranking position. The cost, $0!
If you’re a local service business, making sure you take advantage of this free online marketing opportunity should be a number one priority for 2016.
Google My Business allows you to provide existing and prospective local customers with the information they need in the first place the majority of people look: Google Search.
If you’ve engaged an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert to help you attract new business through your online efforts, make sure that they provide you with a Google My Business page and, most importantly, all the points listed below are being addressed.
Set Up Your Google My Business Free Listing
First, search to see if your listing already exists. If a listing for your business already exists, you can edit the listing by accessing your Google Account.
If you don’t yet have a listing, create one from scratch by clicking “Get on Google” at http://www.google.com/business.
To do this you’ll need the following information.
A brief description of your business, your phone number, address, website, hours of operation, and any other contact info you want to advertise, and a logo or image that represents your business (for example, a picture of your office, store, or restaurant).
Next, check the box at the bottom of the form to list your company as a service area business if you don’t have a brick-and-mortar storefront. This will enable you to set up service areas based on your location so that your business will display on Google maps when keywords describing your service appears in local searches.
Verify Your Business
Before Google will present your page to the public, it will need to verify that your business exists, Google will need to verify your listing. To do this Google will mail you a postcard in 1-2 weeks with verification information and next steps. As an alternative, you can verify your business via phone.
Optimize Your Listing through Your Corresponding Google+ Page
Google My Business page provides the basic data for your Google+ page, which is the page you’ll use to provide additional data about your business along with all important posts, photos, videos and other content, which Google will use as the basis for your local ranking.
Keep in mind that your ranking on local searches depends on the relevance and continual updating of the content on your Google + page. Once you have added your basic information, such as a cover photo, and links to your website, blog etc. adding status updates once or twice a week should take only five or ten minutes at most, but will pay off handsomely over time with top of list, first page rankings.
Customer reviews on Google + are an important component of Google’s ranking algorithm, so always make an effort to acquire these at the time of sale or the completion of a job.
