Google has moved in a local direction for many searches. There is a fundamental shift in the way people are communicating! What Google has done is create a “page” on their website for just about every business. What they haven’t done is so well, is tell everyone. Essentially, this means that Google has incorporated “Places” into search results to help people find businesses in their area that provide the product or service that they need. Incidentally, there are 2.6 billion local searches a month. Is your business getting its share of those searches? Email info@gectv.com for a FREE 80 Point Marketing Checklist!
So for example, if you search for “tires” plus your local area you will get a list of companies who sell tires around you. If you do this search on your mobile device you’ll even get them sorted by geography, with Google using your location to help refine your results. As you can see, a places listing can be quite beneficial to a merchant.
There is no downside for a business to claim its local listing and in fact there are several upsides.
It’s clear that, when you claim your “places” listing, you can manage what shows up there like: your address, phone number, hours of operation, etc. instead of relying on out of date information you can manage your information to ensure that it is up to date. What’s more, if your business relocates or has to change a contact number you don’t have to wait until the next printing of say, the yellow pages. You just log in and change your places page.
Plus, as the owner of a places page you can add photos and videos to further augment your listing and give visitors some insight into who you are.
There are intangible benefits of claiming your places page too. In fact, you get a very important and powerful link from Google to your site.
Think about that for a second –when your listing is claimed and your website linked to it, you have created a new link to your site from Google.com. How significant is that?
There’s also the benefits a business gets from adding products and services to its places page. Now, your business has additional information that can be indexed by a search engine to make it more relevant than its competitors, thus rank higher, which is the name of the game.
Just understand that local search optimization and ranking is a process and neither Google, Yahoo or Bing move faster than a couple weeks from submission to actually getting listed and ranked in local search for all to see. It’s a tedious process to be sure, but at the end of the day the benefits are many. A customer can find your business (how important is that), get directions, call you, email you or text you, save the link, see your photos and details, send your information to their email, car (if it’s mobile enabled) or GPS. You definitely want to be “on the map”. You definitely want to be optimized for local search.
In addition to local search benefits found on the computer, notebook, iPad, iTouch etc., Google, Yahoo & Bing have gone Mobile. That’s right; they publish all this great local data specifically for mobile devices. Why? Fast facts: there are approx. 5 billion plus cell phone users vs. 1.8 billion Internet users (about 3x in market size.) Of these users, approx. 51 Million use Smart Phones. Nearly a third of smart phone owners use their device as their primary Internet connection.
When you optimize your business for Mobile devices (that means creating pages that show up well on mobile devices like smart phones) your customers can interact with you from their mobile device! (Instead of thinking web page, think smart phone page).This means they can and will participate in mobile coupons, click to call campaigns, SMS (texts) campaigns and QR (quick response) code campaigns. Very cool.
