When creating your business listing, make sure you choose the correct category you want your business listing to appear in, e.g. if you provide plumbing as a service, you want to choose ‘plumbing’ as your category, not ‘trades’ or ‘home repairs’
Building citations
Citations are the links of local SEO. A citation occurs each time your name, address, phone number (NAP) is mentioned on the web. The more citations you have than competitors, the more likely your site will rank higher than theirs. The easiest places to build citations are the many local business directories available for businesses.
Building reviews
Citations and reviews are the link building of local SEO. If you are only building citations, you only have half of the equation covered. To rank highly, you need to be aggressive in ensuring your business accumulates online reviews. Many businesses struggle with this. This is because it’s tough to get customers to fill out reviews! You have to make it easy for your customers. Make it easy for your customers to fill out reviews and you will get more reviews.
Include links to your business Google+ page on your site, email signatures, flyers, and business cards, prompting customers to leave a review. Encourage customers at the end of each job or transaction to leave a review. By creating every opportunity possible for customers to leave a review, you will significantly increase the amount of reviews you receive. But whatever you do, do not buy reviews. This is a quick way to get into Google’s naughty books. Purchased reviews can be picked up by Google’s filters and not included on the profile.
Citations and reviews are the link building of local SEO
If you are only building citations, you only have half of the equation covered. To rank highly, you need to be aggressive in ensuring your business accumulates online reviews. Many businesses struggle with this. This is because it’s tough to get customers to fill out reviews! You have to make it easy for your customers.
Make it easy for your customers to fill out reviews and you will get more reviews. Include links to your business Google+ page on your site, email signatures, flyers, and business cards, prompting customers to leave a review. Encourage customers at the end of each job or transaction to leave a review.
By creating every opportunity possible for customers to leave a review, you will significantly increase the amount of reviews you receive. But whatever you do, do not buy reviews. This is a quick way to get into Google’s naughty books. Purchased reviews can be picked up by Google’s filters and not included on the profile.
A growing problem has emerged on the Internet in the past couple of years. There’s literally billions of sites and webpages with an infinite amount of information—all completely unorganized… A bureaucratic nightmare! There are endless pages about movies, customer reviews, local businesses, product catalogs, and so on, and there has been no standardized way of organizing or presenting this information. A need emerged for a universal method to make it easy for search engines to quickly recognize this information.
Last word
These new technologies mean you can have greater control over your search listings, make it easier for search engines to crawl your site, and achieve ‘rich snippets’ like the example below, with which you can achieve higher clickthrough-rates and get more eyeballs on your content. Think of this new technology like Meta description tags on steriods.
