How to Optimize a Google Places Local Business Listing

admin    Google Optimization     business, Google, Listing, Local, Optimize, Places

How to Optimize a Google Places Local Business Listing

 Introduced in March 2004, Google Local displays local business information at the top of many of Google’s organic search results accompanied by a map. As of June 2010, Google Places listings consist of 1, 3 or 7 businesses for most searches. Considering that most localized searches provide millions of organic search results, showing in the top 7 of Google Places can be invaluable to a business.

Breaking into the top 7 takes knowledge and time and staying there takes effort. It all starts with claiming and optimizing your Google Places local business listing.

Visit Google and search for Google Places. Register for an account. Follow the bouncing ball until you can click on the button that says “Add a Business”.

As a quick aside, it is assumed that anyone who would read this knows that Google Places only allows one listing per phone number. While you can in fact create multiple listings with the same number and reap the benefit for a short time, eventually you’ll find that all of your listings have disappeared into the void. Don’t play games with Google Places. It isn’t worth the time and effort it takes to undo the damage should you cross the dozens of arbitrary, invisible boundaries that Google has in place to try to make the entire process “fair” for every business.

The first page of the submission form is mostly fill in the blank, but there are 3 important opportunities to optimize the listing.

Company/Organization: Choose your business name wisely. No one audits the listings to verify that the company name matches your incorporation documents, but be careful. If you company’s legal name is “Paul’s Professional Services, Inc.”, you need to carefully tweak it for the purposes of Google Places optimization. Two common methods are to add a keyword descriptor or your primary city. For example: “Paul’s Professional Painting Services” or “Paul’s Painting Services of Dallas”. Monkey with your company name too much using obviously manipulative methods for cramming keywords into the field and you’ll eventually find that your Google Places listing has been relegated to a black hole by Google. Typically, this is the direct result of your competition reporting your listing to Google. Simply conduct a Google search for “locksmith google spammers” and you’ll find some insight on why you do not want to get on the bad side of Google Places.

Description: Carefully craft a 200 character description of your business focusing almost exclusively on your key products and services. Do not waste space here for marketing speak such as “Proudly serving the DFW area since 1974″. Do not waste space here by including geographic references. The geography is almost entirely controlled by the city you list for your address. Inclusion of additional cities does virtually nothing when it comes to optimizing your Google Places listing.

For our hypothetical painting company, Paul’s Professional Services, an optimized description would go something like:

Residential and commercial painter specializing in interior and exterior painting. Services include wall painting, ceiling painting, textures, faux finishes and color matching. Free estimates.

Note that the example include not only the company’s top services, but also includes multiple uses of the primary keyword in various forms – “painting” and “painter” are the top two keywords in searches according to Google’s Keyword Tool. In addition, “free” is a top search word for virtually any search phrase.

It is important to remember that the description is designed to reach a broader search audience – not win awards on Madison Avenue. Keep it simple and include your top keywords. 200 characters is not a lot of room, so make sure not to waste space.

Category: Google Places requires the use of at least one standard category. Begin by typing your top keywords and choose the most relevant category. Google Places provides the ability to include 5 categories. Use them. If your top keywords are not standard categories, then use one or two closely related standard categories and use the remaining three slots for specific keywords.

For our hypothetical company, the categories might look something like:
Painter (Standard)
Painting Contractor (Top keyword search / Custom Category)
House Painter (Top keyword search / Custom Category)
Commercial Painter (Top keyword search / Custom Category)
Handyman (Standard, but an extremely popular related search term)

NEXT. Page Two of submission form.

The Service Areas and Location Settings options are relatively new and are designed to allow a business to establish a service area if the company does not have a storefront of some sort. Initially, choosing a service area (“Yes, this business serves customers at their locations”) appeared to hinder the optimization process. While the jury is still out, Google continues to tweak this feature. If in doubt, complete the option accurately for your business.

Business hours and payment options are purely optional and serve little if any value to the optimization process. Potential customers certainly will find the information useful.

Google Places provides the ability to add up to 10 photos and 5 videos (from YouTube.com). Make sure you always use keywords to name your photos and take advantage of the “tag” functions provided by YouTube.com. The impact on Google Places traffic is limited, but any impact is good.

Additional details: Google’s examples are virtually useless and very misleading. To optimize your listing, create a table of your key products and services using as many keywords as possible. Each detail consists of two fields with a maximum space of 200 characters each. An example of an effective use of these fields for our hypothetical company would be:

Interior & Exterior Painting Contractor specializing in: Wall painting, Ceiling painting, Floor staining, Epoxy Floor coatings, Texture paint finishes, faux finishes, color matching, proper surface preparation

The colon is the separator between the two fields. Include as many additional details about your company, your products and your services as possible.

Feel free to include service areas as one of the Additional Details for informational purposes, but do not expect it to cause your Google Places listing to show in those cities.
SUBMIT.

The new Google Places local business listing will not be active until verified. Usually, verification can be completed by triggering a phone call from Google’s computers to the phone number of record for the listing. In some instances, Google requires verification via a postcard mailed to the address of record for the listing. Postcards can take up to 5 weeks to arrive. Once verified, the real work begins.

Paul Dumas has provided Internet marketing, website design and SEO services to local businesses for over 13 years. He is founder and owner of Optimized Local Search Services. Additional articles related to local SEO and Internet trends for local business are available on the blog: http://optimizedlocalsearch.com/localsearchblog

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How To Optimize Your Google Places Listing

admin    Google Optimization     Google, Listing, Optimize, Places

How To Optimize Your Google Places Listing

These firms typically have a website, but don’t rank effectively in the search results simply because their web site becomes lost inside the search engine “Sandbox”, with little hope of digging their way out. Smallbusinesses that are looking to drive a lot more site visitors to their website, have a tremendous opportunity to advance their listings and get first page results making use of the Yahoo and Google Maps Platform. Google Maps (also known as Google Places), supply small| business owners the ability to get their organization noticed on the web, by way of Geo-targeted Investigation.

In optimizing your small business| profile, Google Maps will bring your company initial page exposure by displaying native results to search users based on location. If your internet site is already getting sufficient listings on the search engine results pages, the local| business listing will build increased exposure for your organization. Your Google Places Listing| can offer driving directions, company info, operating hours and quite a few other distinctive features for your potential consumers.

Small companies can build their company listing in Google Maps by searching for Google| Places (formally Local Business Center) navigating to the site and creating a free account.

Make certain to fill out all of the offered categories in order to far better maximize your listings potential. The more accurate your details is, the more success you will see from your listing. Make positive to fill out all the info you can.

Your Google Places listing ought to have the same business name, address and telephone number as the information that appears on your business internet site. Attempt to prevent using 800 numbers, as they negatively impact the listing. 800 numbers might be added as an extra phone number, but attempt to provide a regular number as your primary point of contact.

Google only allows its Places users to create a single profile for their enterprise. If your company has multiple locations, you’ll be able to add this information using the “list of area’s served” section of the Google Places profile. Again, accuracy in this section will provide far better final results for your profile as it’s served on the Google Maps Platform.
These consist of images and video. You should also create coupons and add weekly specials to the profile as nicely. The far more data you supply Google, the better they can index you, thus driving much more traffic and far more qualified visitors to your website.

Filling out your Google Places business profile is just the start of your local internet marketing campaign. If your business is not very competitive, you may possibly be lucky enough to rank high in the search benefits for local business listings, just from filling out your profile information alone. But more competitive industries will need additional effort and optimization.

Encourage your consumers and clients to write testimonial style opinions for your company in the “review section” of your listing. Google will also populate your listing profile with reviews from evaluation websites such as Yelp and Kudzu as well. Employing these aforementioned tactics, integrated with a local SEO and Internet marketing campaign is one of the greates methods to improve targeted traffic to your web site and advance your small business’ Internet success.

To find out more about Google Places Optimization vistit the Searchtech website.

Realtors, Get Your Next Listing Using a Geo Targeted Google Ad campaign.

admin    Google     Campaign, Google, Listing, Next, Realtors, Targeted, Using

Local buyers and sellers are actively searching for Realtors on the Internet. Studies show that these potential customers are serious when searching on the internet for real estate services. The problem is as a local Realtor you have to figure out how to get these customers to your real estate website, and you have to do it without breaking the bank.

Did you know that 74% of U.S. households use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally. 45% of local searchers have the intent of doing business locally. The percentage of people who use yellow page advertising decreased from 75% to 62% last year. If you’re one of the many Realtors who have a yellow page ad, it’s time to consider buying a smaller ad and shifting your marketing dollars to the Internet.

As a local Realtor, it’s hard to ignore these facts. If you want to compete in your local real estate market you must have an internet presence where your customers are searching. Google’s local, or “geo targeted’ pay per click marketing can put your real estate website on the first page of Google where your future customers are searching.

In a professionally created Google pay per click advertising campaign keyword phrases are used to trigger your ads when someone searches using that phrase. An example of a keyword phrase that might be used would be “real estate in Glens Falls”. When someone types in this keyword phrase your ad, pointing to your real estate website, would be displayed. Chances are you will also see ads for your competitors on the same page. The cost per click for ad positioning on this page may be somewhat competitive.

Now, this is where “geo targeting” comes in to play. A professional pay per click marketer would never use the phrase “real estate” for your pay per click campaign. Imagine all the people on the internet that type in “real estate” everyday. Your ad would show thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of times per day to people who are not searching for real estate in your area. Some of them will click on your ad costing you money.

However, when implementing a “geo targeted” pay per click advertising campaign, you can use a general keyword like “real estate”. It has also been my experience that the cost for that same click is much lower in a “geo targeted’ campaign.

Here’s why. When setting up your “geo targeted” campaign I use your physical address. Then I tell Google what the ‘search radius” for this campaign will be. You can go out 5 miles, ten miles, or 100 miles. You decide how far you would travel from your location to do business. It’s entirely up to you. Google will then serve your ad only to searchers within that “search radius”. Now for the best part, your competition did not bid on the keywords “real estate”, he is bidding on “real estate in Glens Falls”. He does not have a separate “geo targeted’ campaign set up. So, there is a lot less competition in your “geo targeted” advertising campaign, hence, you pay less per click. In fact you pay a lot less. My Realtor customers save about 50% per click as opposed to all the other pay per click campaigns out there.

They also gobble up lots of local business right in their back yard. So, how do you promote your real estate website? Remember, real estate agents will not be replaced by technology, they will be replaced by the agents who use technology to their advantage.

Google Listing — How to Get Articles to Do Your Work for You

admin    Google     Articles, Google, Listing, Work

All of us at least have one point of expertise on which we can speak, write and work on our website. But now your website is ready and you do not have been listed in major search engine like Google and yahoo etc. You want them to listed as soon as you started a website. But it is tricky.

To get into Google and Yahoo listing you can use a lot of method described by many so called experts. And quite true too. I want to remind one very sophisticated and elegant way to do this and believe me Google just love it. The method is Article marketing. And this is done by getting back links from a already listed website. In this Article can work wonder. There are many article publishing websites and ezines where an article is accepted free and after review get published.

For example, www.ezinearticles.com accept the free article submission and its Google page rank is 6 which is quite a good one. Now any article published in this ezine will get a good SERPs in Google as well as any search engine.

All the new article content of these pages are crawled by google bot almost daily. So if you put a backlink in your articles resource box to you website, your website will also be crawled daily for that article in this ezine. And you site will also be indexed by Google.

Another google website is www.impactarticles.com This is a very good website for getting listed in google particularly. Submit your article here and see the result in few days in your Google listing.

Apart from these SEO aspect, articles are a great way to market and brand your own name. It establish you as an expert in that particular subject. Article marketing can help you to gain a good number of visitors who are highly targeted one. And these article can help you to get higher Google page rank. If you are interested into submitting your articles at 85 websites with higher Google page rank visit

http://www.nuttymarketer.com/green/gorilla_marketing_service.htm for the list of websites and ezines.

This article may be re-printed as long as following resource box is included as it is with out any alteration.

Increase Your Page Rank, Get More Back Links and Get That Top 10 Listing in Google

admin    Google     back, Google, Increase, links, Listing, more, Page, Rank

You would be amazed at what lengths people will go to get that coveted top 10 spot in Google. Some strategies are outright evil, while others are legit but on the verge of being considered morally wrong. So how do you increase your page rank to get a top 10 listing in Google and other major search engines without risking your name, reputation and business? This article will detail the best and ethical ways to get back links, mainly one way links, to your website.

First of all, before I delve into the details, I must stress the importance of search engine optimization. You may think that this is an overused term and that it doesn’t concern you. Well, you couldn’t be more wrong! Without optimizing your pages for the search engines you are setting your website up for failure. Nothing else I explain here will matter, or more importantly help you, if you don’t optimize your website.

With that said, let’s continue. A commonly used form of marketing, and quite frankly the most effective, is article marketing. This is the easiest way I know how to get your website listed in the top 10 on the first page of Google, if not the number one spot, and at the same time increase your page rank. I have personally achieved this myself, all with just writing and distributing articles. Do a search on Google for “honest online income.” At the time of me writing this my website is currently ranked number two on the first page. I’m not a professional writer by any means, so if I can do it, so can you.

The key principle behind article marketing is getting as many one way back links as possible. The more websites pointing to your site, the more relevant and authoritative it looks in the eyes of Google. This is where search engine optimization comes into play. You want your website ranking high for the keywords that you have chosen. If you don’t know how to do this I suggest you do some research. I’ve written other articles that cover SEO and article marketing in more detail.

Now I will talk about other ways to get more one way links to your website. Again, remember that back links are what help your website to move further up in the search engines. In conjunction, this will increase your page rank at the same time. You want to get as many one way links as possible. With a top 10 listing in Google, your website will receive a lot of targeted traffic. This is essential for your business.

Other ways to get more one way links include social network sites. Sign up for a service like OnlyWire and when you post to your blog, bookmark the post with OnlyWire and your post will show up in all the major social network sites. This creates a lot of back links to your post. MySpace and Facebook are social sites that you can use to your advantage as well. There are places where you can advertise and place links to your website.

Become active in forums. Place a link to your website in your signature file. Every time you make a post, your signature will be at the end of that post. So, the more you participate and post, the more links you have pointing to your website.

Submitting your website is another way to gain more links. There are literally thousands of directories on the internet. Do some research. Find directories that have a higher Page Rank than your website. This will be very beneficial.

I hope by now you realize the importance of getting back links to your website and increasing your page rank. It is relatively easy to achieve. Start out small. Over time create more and more one way links. You can never have too many; the more the better. Eventually, your website will be in the top 10 listings on Google for your keywords.