Let’s get straight into one of the best ways to capture traffic and sales, all for free. Relatively new to Australia (at least here in WA) is the Google Local Business Centre, or the ability to list your business on Google Maps.
Typically you’d enter a search term such as ‘Hairdressers Maylands’ or ‘Restaurants in Fremantle’ and be greeted with a map of the location and three or ten businesses plotted out for you. Considering these listings appear before the organic results, and play by a different set of ranking rules – you can quite easily outrank a larger competitor who is without a Local Listing. All for free, with minimum input from yourself!
So let’s get started…
Firstly, navigate to http://www.google.com.au/local/add . You’ll need a Google account for this step so if you don’t already have one, sign up now. Trust me, you’ll need it for much more than the Local Business Centre.
The first screen asks for your basic business information, but even here there are opportunities to optimise the listing.
- Title: Although it is against Google best practice to put anything other than your business name here, throw in a term or keyword you are targeting. For example, the Leederville Dome Café (if it exists, there’s bound to be one there) might set their title as ‘Dome Café – Coffee Leederville’. Don’t overdo it, nothing will raise the spam flag quicker than ‘Joe’s Plumbing Perth, Gasfitting Perth, Plumbers Perth’.
- Address: Street addresses are the best here. If you run your business from home and don’t want it displayed, enter the street name only. In the past PO Boxes were a great way to hide your address and also plot your location much closer to your city centre, but both PO Boxes and proximity to the ‘centroid’ are slowly becoming less relevant.
- Phone: Landlines are preferred, mobile numbers are acceptable. Don’t bother with your 1300 or 1800 number here, as it ranks lower and can be a roadblock when ‘claiming’ this listing.
- Categories: Don’t be tempted to stuff keywords in here. You’ll need at least one category set by Google and up to four custom set by you, but make sure they are terms that will be searched and are relevant to your business.
The next page is where you can fill your listing with relevant content. Make sure you write an accurate description and try to get your targeted keywords in their without compromising its readability. Upload as many photos as you can, up to ten, and link to any videos about your business that you’ve uploaded to Youtube. (We’ve all had a professional video advertisement created, right? No?)
What I’ve found when creating Local Business listings for bloo customers is that content goes a long way in the rankings, and their bloo advertisements already contain all the images and info we need to create a successful listing. bloo can also produce a high definition video advertisement for your business at an extremely competitive price which you can use for this purpose, embed in your web site, or use for a television campaign.
Finally at the bottom of this page you’re given the chance to spell out the finer details of your service that didn’t fit in the ‘categories’ box. Using the ‘Service’ : ‘Description’ pairs as below, we can get a lot of relevant keywords in here. For example a beauty salon may list the following:
IPL Treatments : Yes
Day Spa : Yes
Manicures : Yes
Once again, don’t spam it but fill it up!
Next comes activating and claiming your listing. This is extremely important as an ‘unverified’ listing will have extremely poor ranking. The easiest way to do this is with a phone call, choosing this method will trigger a call to the number you’ve listed and a recording will give you a five digit pin number. Enter this alongside your listing in your Local Business Centre and you’re done!
Next week we’ll look at some of the steps you can take after your listing is live to improve its ranking.
