If you have a local business and still do not know Google My Business, now is the time to use Local SEO to give it more visibility. What do you need to position your business locally?
- A Web page
- A Gmail account
- A Google My Business account
If you have the first two, you can go accessing the Google My Business website here. By the end of this post, if you have followed all the advice, you will be in a couple of weeks positioned in the local results. Requirements to achieve this:
That the sector of your business does not have a strong online competition, in which case it will take up to 4 or 5 months.
That the city where you are from is not Madrid or Barcelona. For these cases, I do not promise anything, because you would have to look at the specific case and perhaps implement more changes.
But, first of all, do you know what Google My Business is?
Google My Business is a Google platform through which local businesses are linked to their environment. This was done before by Google + company pages and Google Places listings, but now we can enjoy the combined service.
If you still do not know what I mean, look at this example page:
It is a cleaning company that we did local SEO, and we make SEO and positioning payment. In fact, if you notice in this case not only appears in the first 2 positions by organic positioning but in the 3rd we have the company again positioned locally and also accompany this with a payment ad on Google just to the right of the local search Well, to the point.
Surely you’ve ever seen results like the box while doing a Google search. Well, this is Local positioning.
Advantages of Google My Business and Local SEO
If you look at this search it is very interesting because Google puts at our disposal:
- A more transactional search, since it has the exact location of the business and the telephone number to contact.
- It allows you to add and geolocalize quality photos of your business to give it more visibility and for people to discover it more easily.
- Keep up to date and demonstrate your value with reviews about your business, which are available to users to assess.
- You can have statistics about your business page.
- Google My Business will also permit you to be more competitive in SEO against large companies to be able to appear in local search results.
- Doubling your visibility thanks to local searches is possible if you position yourself by “normal” SEO for the same keywords as in Local SEO.
Why register your business on Google?
Do you have a website and do not see what Google My Business could do for you? And yet you will kill three birds with one stone. You optimize your visibility on:
Google: you climb in the top positions on the world’s first search engine. So it’s good for your site.
Google Maps: Take advantage of the geolocation tool par excellence. Your customers, more and more connected, will find you easily wherever they are and via any medium: smartphone, tablet or computer.
Google+: You join the social network powered by Google. You will be able to post pictures and videos, collect the opinions of your customers, inform them of your actions and promotions and answer their questions.
You have every interest in having a complete profile, updated and properly pinned on the map. Not to be located, not to use this virtual showcase will penalize you automatically since the results of Google are ranked according to the relevance and popularity of a company in relation to the request of the user.
Google My Business, cornerstone of local SEO
For small and medium-sized businesses that work primarily with local customers, having a digital presence has not always been obvious. Indeed: why optimize its SEO on the Internet when you make its turnover thanks to customers who live nearby and consumers passing through? In this case, a good physical positioning seems more relevant.
However, being visible on the search engines is not good for major brands and for national or international companies. With the development of mobile uses- in 2016, Google searches on smartphones for the first time exceeded searches on computers – Internet users are increasingly likely to make local queries on search engines.
Hence the place that must be given to local SEO in its business strategy, even when it does not necessarily need a global presence online. Hence the importance of Google My Business, a fusion of Google+ Local and Google Places, to provide businesses with an optimal digital showcase.
Registering on Google My Business allows, first of all, to improve the visibility of its website on the search engines, to give essential information (address, contact telephone number, schedule) and to communicate with its customers. With 97% of Internet users who are used to searching Google to find service providers and shops nearby, these are crucial advantages for local SEO.
Customers also have the ability to communicate directly with the company via Google Hangout and post notes and comments that other users can see. In addition, since the launch of the Opossum algorithm dedicated to local referencing, geolocation has taken a new turn: pages are now classified according to the geographical positioning of the company.
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