Claiming your Google Place Page listing is imperative no matter if you run an online or offline business.
Google Places, formerly known as Google Maps, is a fantastic way to maintain an online presence, especially if you have a physical business without a website. You can provide potential customers, who are likely looking for a local service, with valuable and specific information about your exact location, opening hours, photos, videos, your services, and customer reviews. It also allows you to offer customers additional incentives to use your business in the form of coupons.
The process of claiming your Google Places listing is very simple. Just open a Google account and once you have done this and signed in, you should go to Business Solutions. In the “Reach new customers” section, you’ll see a link for Google Places. Clicking on the link will take you to the section where you can claim your business listing.
Many businesses have reclaimed their Google Places listing but have not fully used it and it will be of little value as a result. Simply entering business name, address, phone number and choosing a business category type is not enough.
Many local Google searches will now return a first page of results that includes a Google map along with a list of up to 7 businesses that Google considers to match the search query. So, for example, if a potential customer searches for ‘Plumber in Manchester’, Google will return results that include a list of 7 local plumbers and a map of Manchester and the surrounding area with pins pointing to the exact locations of each of the 7 businesses. .
As a plumber in Manchester, you would ideally like to appear as one of these 7 business listings. To give you the best chance of doing this, you should make full use of your Google Places listing by entering as much information as possible. If you don’t optimize your listing correctly, it won’t appear in Google Places.
Here are 10 tips for optimizing a Google Place Page listing:
1) Please specify your company name (it may be helpful to also include the geographic area you are targeting, ie XYZ Plumbing Ltd | Manchester).
2) Please list full details of your business address, including postal code (if you work from home, you may choose to keep your address private).
3) Add your primary phone number plus additional fax, mobile numbers if you have them.
4) Enter your website details (check the box if you don’t have one) and your email address.
5) You now have 200 characters to describe your business. It is very important that you include keywords here in the description that potential customers will use to search for your type of business and location.
6) The next section asks you to specify the categories in which your business falls. This is an area where many businesses fail to claim their Google Places listing. There is one category box available initially and you will see cases where businesses fill out this single category box and then move on, whereas there are in fact 5 category boxes that can be filled out. You must include your business in a category that matches Google’s suggestions as you type in the details. For example, when you start typing ‘Plumber’, Google will suggest ‘Plumber’ and ‘Plumber Tradesman’. You can then click ‘add category’ 4 more times and enter your own category keywords based on what people use to search for your type of business including location ie ‘Plumbing Services Manchester’, ‘Plumbing Engineer Heating Manchester’, etc.
7) Choose if your business provides services, such as delivery or home repair, to locations in a certain area. Here you can choose to hide your address if you prefer and choose to show the area your business serves in terms of distance or by specifying the actual areas covered using place names or postal codes.
8) Specify your opening hours.
9) List all payment options available to customers.
10) Add business/product images (list as many as you can up to a maximum of 10), videos (max of 5), and any additional details about your business ie parking, warranties, refund policies, etc.
As you add information to your listing, everything you’ve completed so far appears on the right side of the page along with a percentage. The goal is to complete each section and achieve a completion score of 100%.
Google has the following help pages to help you as you go: “Building a Great Listing,” “Tips to Help People Find Your Business,” and “Business Listing Quality Guidelines.”
To further enhance your listing and give you the maximum opportunity to appear on the Google Map and 7 Business Listing on Page 1 for your search terms, you can add coupons and get reviews. There is a separate coupon tab that appears on the ‘View Report’ page. Creating coupons online helps incentivize people to visit your site or contact your business. Invite customers to leave reviews of your service through their own Google accounts. Getting more reviews than your competitors gives you the opportunity to get a much higher ranking listing.
When you have finished completing your listing, Google will ask you to verify your listing. You can do this by receiving a phone call, a text message on your mobile phone, or by sending a postcard to your business address. It’s much faster and easier to verify over the phone or text. You will be given a PIN number that you simply enter on your Google Places page.
You can see how potential customers see your ads by signing in to your account and clicking ‘View your ad on Google Maps’.
Google is also offering a new ‘View Report’ dashboard that gives you important insights into impression count (how many times users saw your business listing as a local search result) and actions (how many times users showed interest in your listing). business) registered. for your listing. This is very useful information that can be used as part of the search engine optimization of your listing and website, if you have one.
If your business isn’t listed, there’s no better time than now. Searching online for local businesses will only increase in importance and the sooner you take your footing the better. You can drive free, targeted traffic to your business.
