Do you have your business appearing on the first page of Google?
If you are a small business owner I am sure you have heard about Google Places – Google’s free business listing service. And if you haven’t do a search for Google Places and fill in the form and then come back here to get tips ho how to get more bang from your free Google Places business listing.
Back in 2009 Google relaunched it’s Business Centre to Google places, which allows local business owners to create a profile of their business, including phone number, address, website, pictures, videos, trading hours, etc and also mark your business location on the Google Maps service.
Creating a Google Places listing is a great way to get your business (even if you don’t have a website) to appear on the first page of Google search results when someone performs a local search.
A Google Places listing is very easy and straight forward to set up, however what I want to do in this article is get you a few extra tips that will help you get more leverage from your Google Places listing.
1. Customers Reviews – The more reviews you have on your business listing the better it will perform. First it provides social proof to your customers or potential customers also it will help to keep your listing near the top.
A good way to do this is to send an email to your new customers asking them to leave a review; this can be done on complete autopilot with an autoresponder or email management service.
Include a link in your email signature inviting existing customers to leave comments, ask people on your Facebook page, and when people enter your shop/store.
2. Other Business Listings – Google scrap information from other business directories to verify phone numbers, address, etc are the same and also places these listings in your Google Places profile. Make sure all the other business listings you create in other directories are consistent.
3. Keywords – This is a very important factor when creating your business listing. If you have a house painting business in Parramatta, Sydney you would want to target keywords like “house painting” “interior house painter” “exterior house painter” “residential painter”, etc.
Do not try and trick Google by placing loads of keywords into your company name. For example if you have a house painting business called ABC”s Painting Service then you may want to list your company name as ABC”s House Painting Service.
This way you can get 2 of the keywords you are targeting “House Painting” instead of just “Painting” however if you try and stuff keywords into your company name for example: “House and Commercial Painter, Interior & Exterior ABC Painting Company” just to get more keywords, it may work in the short term but Google quickly picks up on this and it will work against you.
