My second post on optimising your local business listing focuses upon the off site optimisation process. If you haven’t read my first post yet on optimising your local listing, then I recommend you read this first.
Consistent Details Across Relevant Data Centres
With the Google local listings the major step to improving your rank in the 7 spot is simply by verifying your ownership of the business in Google’s local business centre.
This is a straight forward step and allows you to modify details such as address, and phone number and then confirm those changes either by post or phone.
Due to the ease in which anybody can add or edit a business listing, Google will index additional data centres to confirm the details on a business. Those businesses who take the time to optimise their listings on these 3rd party sites will rank higher than those that don’t.
Optimise Your Listings on These Sites
You should add yourself or edit your details on the following 3rd party websites, ensuring that the data you enter is consistent with your local business listing details.
This ensures that Google can match up the details you entered in your LBL account to the details found about your business on other sites. If this is done consistently you’ll see improved rankings in the LBL results.
Market Location – Sign up page
Yahoo Local UK – Sign up through Infoserve
Expect to have some of these sites contact you after you have submitted your details. They will try and sell you premium listings and advertising spots. It can be annoying, but putting up with a single sales call is worth it just to get your business listed successfully.
Once you have added yourself to the sites Google tends to use to confirm your details you’ll need to give it some time to let those additions have an impact on your listings rank. I have seen this take months, rather than days so be patient.
Generate Reviews
The next step in optimising your local business listings is to generate reviews. These reviews can either be directly input on Google itself or on one of these 3rd party websites.
Google seems to place a fair bit of weight on reviews when deciding upon the LBL rankings. It seems at the moment that volume of reviews, is more important than quality of reviews, though I would expect that at some point in the future this may change.
How to Generate Reviews?
This will depend on the type of business you are, but sometimes it can be as simple as asking your previous or existing clients to log onto Google and leave you a review.
Word of warning here, and I tested this out myself to see if they noticed. Don’t be tempted to add false reviews, particularly from the same IP address. Google will notice, remove it, and drop your ranking temporarily as a punishment.
Here is a recent example I have from one of my clients, a hairdressers. I recommended they offer their clients a discount on their next haircut if they left a review on one of the 3rd party sites about their experience of the haircut. This could be achieved via a simple coupon with instructions and a list of sites to access. Then you ask the user to print out proof of their review and bring it with them on their next visit.
This tactic works well for a number of reasons:
1)You are giving people a financial incentive to leave you a review. Most people won’t ever add reviews onto these sites, so this option gives you the opportunity to drive volume that your competitors will never be able to match.
2) If you’re offering a discount for a review and you ask the customer to print it out as proof then its unlikely they will give you a bad review. How many people would leave a bad review about your service and then come back with a printed record of it?
Having lots of positive reviews will not only increase your local business listing rank, but it will also drive users to choose your listing, and convert at a higher rate. Lets be honest, most people will always go for the company or product with the most positive reviews right?
Hope this is useful, please feel free to use the comments below to ask any additional questions or share you experiences of Google local.
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