Marketing on Google Places has gotten even more competitive. It used to be you could simply fill out your business listing on Google and see it in the 7 pack a few weeks later. These days, if your listing doesn’t have a 100% score, you can forget about being listed in the first 7 local businesses that Google displays for local results. That said, here are 5 things you can do to get more business from local search:
(1) Make sure your Google listing has a 100% score – There are more than 20 different fields in your Google Places listing and surprisingly most businesses don’t bother to fill them all in. At the end of the day, the difference between showing up on the first page of Google Places or not can boil down to not having a video as part of your listing.
(2) Include product or service keywords in your listing description –As with any content on the internet, be sure not to over use your keywords. Your description should be written for people with an eye for SEO.
(3)Encourage your clients to write a review on your Google places listing – Think about it, if you and 10 local competitors all have 100% scores on your listing, which is fast becoming the case, what will Google use to rank order these businesses? The one component of the profile that is open ended is the review section so in many cases, the business with the most reviews can win the day.
(4) Make sure you are listed in your local phone book –Google looks to established sources of data to both build their database and check for local business information. If you’re not listed here, it may affect your ability to rank on the first page.
(5) Get listed in the other top local directories like:
- Yelp
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Best of the Web
- Hotfrog, and
- Foursquare
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