I know, you probably feel that it is troublesome to go through all these just to claim the business that is yours. However, think positively – the verification process is for Google to confirm that your business is legitimate and that you are the business owner. If they did not have this procedure, anyone could just claim it as their business and pretend to be the business owner.
Make sure that every relevant section of your listing is complete. Imagine being a customer seeing this incomplete information, would you trust this business? If you run into issues, contact Google My Business Listing Support.
4) Optimize “Google My Business” For local SEO Marketing
Once you have claimed your “Google My Business,” here comes the optimization part.
A study by Gyno showed that users are very much influenced by businesses with a complete listing before intending to visit a store or purchase from it.
How to improve google maps SEO ranking
When optimizing your Google My Business listing, pick the exact match of your business category. Many businesses think that choosing multiple category listings is better, but the truth is – it is not.
Google prefers businesses that categorize their listing under the most relevant category. For example, if you are an Italian restaurant, you should pick the category “Italian restaurant” instead of just “restaurant.” When optimizing Google My Business, don’t forget to:
- Write a solid description of your business.
- List your business in the right category.
- Update your business operating hours.
- Types of payments accepted.
- Upload the logo or the photo of your business for people to recognize it.
- Add at least ten quality photos of your products or services.
- Check the most popular times of the day and consider Google Adwords to drive visitors.
- Use the new Google Posts feature to stand out.
5) Get More Reviews From Your Customers
Reviews from customers are an essential element. Based on a survey done by Search Engine Journal, 88% of people trust online reviews.
80%+ of people are active on social media platforms, so it’s not difficult to get more reviews at all.
There are many social media management tools out there like Hootsuite that allow you to monitor your social media accounts all in one dashboard. So whenever you get a review from customers, you can respond to it right away.
It does not matter if it is a positive or negative review, be sure to respond to it because it shows your customers that you care about their feedback.
Based on experience, two places are necessary to focus the most are your Facebook page and Google My Business page.
These are the places where people search the most, especially when they are looking for your address. So you would want to pay more attention to this.
Even Google itself also said that positive reviews from customers would improve your business visibility. Shouldn’t we take this as a hint that reviews might be one of the factors in the local ranking?
If you would like to get your gold stars review seen in the search results, go to the Google Developers Structured Data page to enable Rich Snippets for Reviews and Ratings.
6) Use Local Structured Data Markup
Many business owners do not realize this – schema markup or structured data markup is significant and it should be added to your website’s code for search engines to get more information about your business.
How do you add this to your website? It can be added to your existing HTML microdata, the same goes for other tags used on your other web pages.
If you set this up correctly, you will have a better chance to rank higher than your competitors. To check if your markup is implemented successfully, use Google’s Free Testing tool. From there, you can easily see if you are doing it right and let you know the errors in your structured data so that you can fix them.
With the rise of voice search in 2018, schema markup can help to optimize your website for voice search because more and more people are using virtual assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Alexa (especially for local businesses).
Think about a query like “Where’s the nearest coffee shop?” Wouldn’t you want your business to appear on the search engines? Confused? Consider hiring a local SEO Services.
7) Publish More Locally Optimized Content
This is optional, but I do recommend this if you have the time to create more content for your website.
As you can see, people use search engines to look for more information. If your site can provide them the information, at the same time, giving them the location on where to get it, isn’t that very helpful?
Another way to say this is that you are providing every detail that users are looking for on your website.
So there’s no need for them to visit another website for more information.
Seeing that search engines prefer fresh content, this is an excellent opportunity to publish content to answer the questions people are looking for. Most importantly, don’t forget to include your keywords in your:
- Page title.
- Meta description.
- URL.
- H1, H2, and H3 tags.
- ALT text in the images.
- Anchor text.
Adding these on-page elements will help search engines to crawl your website and rank your site on Google.
8) Have A Mobile-Friendly Website For local search
I have mentioned this before, and I will say it again. Since 2007, mobile users have been increasing until today, and it has exceeded the number of people using a desktop.
With this, Google has taken websites that are mobile-friendly as a ranking factor. So if your website is still not mobile-friendly, think about how many potential customers you are losing.
Not just that, page speed is also another factor that should be taken into consideration when it comes to local SEO. With too many things loading on your website, it will slow things down and increases your bounce rate.
To avoid that from happening, optimize your images, enable Gzip compression, and remove all the unused plugins. If you are not sure what’s keeping your website slow, use the PageSpeed tools by Google Developers to find out what you can do.
Start Optimizing Local SEO To Grow Your Business
There you have it! The eight most effective tips to dominate local search for your local SEO marketing in 2019.
However, before we wrap this up, I have another bonus tip for you.
To wrap up, here’s a quick checklist for you to start optimizing for local SEO and grow your business:
- Add keywords to your on-page elements to boost your local SEO.
- Complete your business contact information such as name, address, and phone number (NAP) for customers to look for you.
- Encourage customers to leave quality reviews based on the experience they have had with your business. If you need to remove a Facebook review, read this.
- Respond to all the reviews, be open-minded. Negative reviews are one of the ways for you to understand where else you can do better in your business.
- Add at least ten quality photographs of your business in your profile for customers to recognize your business quickly.
- Stay active. Keep your business profile updated with the latest news.
Want to grow your business? Consider a local search engine optimization Expert
Are you looking for the best local search expert company for your small business?
I am ready to launch your online visibility!