Only recently have the local business listings on Google become so important to an online marketing strategy, particularly for smaller, local businesses. The local listings offer a viable solution to small businesses wishing to generate increased business from search engines on a zero/minimal budget. They require minimal technical knowledge to set-up initially and offer a cheaper solution to high visibility in the search results.
This first post in a series of local business listing optimisation posts will provide some small hints and tips on optimising your listing within Google’s business centre.
Live Example:
ClickITSEO are a Leeds based search marketing agency targeting small to medium sized organisations. As you’d imagine Leeds is therefore quite a critical location for us.
Now we know from Google Adwords data in particular that the highest volume of searches conducted on Google matching our business services and our geographic location is “SEO Leeds” as shown below. Therefore it would be fair to assume that “SEO Leeds” would be the best term to display against in the local business listings for ClickITSEO.
First things, first – create or claim your listing
Assuming you haven’t already created your listing or taken ownership of your business listing you need to do this at the following location Google local business centre. You will need to create a Google account if you haven’t already done so in the past.
Basic Information
The first section you need to complete is your basic information. There isn’t too much optimisation work you can do here, but obviously if you’re targeting customers in Leeds, it helps substantially to have your business address located in that city.
One modification that does seem to have a positive effect on local business listing rank at the moment is including a target keyword within your company name, see below. Also, having a phone number that includes the local area code rather than a mobile or 0800 number seems to be a positive trait to improved rankings.
Categories
The final section within the basic information section is for you to define categories that your business is relevant to. You’ll notice when you begin typing something that Google will provide category recommendations, unless these are well matched to your target keywords don’t use them.
Instead you should input your target keywords as your chosen categories; I don’t mind showing mine below as an example:
Business Listing Photo’s and Videos
I haven’t personally got around to adding photographs or videos to my listing; however I have seen evidence of this improving potential rank. You should also consider the improvement in “trust” generated against your listing if you include photographs and videos showing the premises, employees, or examples of your work.
Additional Details Section
The examples Google provides are quite limited, you should try and pull in more examples of the services/products you provide with further reference to you target keywords. Again, here is an example of my listing to provide some ideas of what to include.
Do consider your business type before adding information against this section. For example, if you are a hairdressers it is likely that potential customers would be very interested to understand if you have parking or not. Personally I don’t think this is an important piece of information to my customer base, so I wouldn’t utilise space putting this down.
I have now posted my second article on local business listing optimisation process, which focuses on the off site optimisation process. This is arguably the most critical ranking factor after verifying your ownership of a listing.
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Good blog Ben. Very indepth run through of the Business listing account. Good luck in showing for PPC Leeds
Cheers Ryan, I don’t think its actually possible at the moment. Seems to be something wrong with that search term and the local listings. I appeared against it briefly top for 2 days then dissapeared again along with everyone else but you. Can’t say I am to bothered, the traffic is insignificant
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the response. I appreciate the traffic levels are limited however my best success has come through that term with receiving two quotes through the term ‘ppc leeds’. I guess the traffic may be low but not exactly insignificant. It all depends on your target market and mine is becomming more solely ‘ppc’, with that in mind i am delighted with the ranking.
Thanks for your time.
Yeah at the end of the day that is a good example of traffic vs. return and why the focus of SEO should always be on ROI. You can drive 1000 visits day from 1 keyword and get no conversions or 2 visits a month from another keyword and get 2 conversions. I know which keyword would be my most important of those 2!