Setting up a Google+ Local listing

As outlined above, this recent transition by Google from the Place pages to Google+ Local requires an increased focus on the importance of these listings, and what businesses are now doing in order to increase their online presence and monitor the information being shared. So if your business doesn’t yet appear within the Google Maps results, or if you need to claim, optimise and enhance an existing listing on Google+ Local, now is the time to act!

To be aware of the level of information sharing through Google’s social media network, and if you’re new to Google Places, it’s important to either create a new local business listing within Google+, or review what is currently being shown for your business and, if necessary, claim your listing and manage the details. That would then enable your local listing to be found within Google+, making it easy for people to review and share your business with friends and across the web.

If you’ve used Google Places before, you’ll still have access to your account page where you can edit and manage your listing. At this stage, the format for this has not changed and it’s just the way that your business is now being presented online that’s different. You can also link your listing to a Google+ account. It continues to be important to add the range of information about your business that you can – description, categories, open times, payment methods, photos or videos and more. However, all this information is not now being displayed in the Google+ Local listing, but they remain important to make your listing 100% complete.

Getting your Google+ Local listing appearing in the search results remains important as well and is dependent on a range of factors, including your physical location, information added to the listing and the use of keywords or categories to help rankings for local search queries. Reviews also remain important, and perhaps more so now that Google is using the Google+ network for these. Reviewers have to use a Google+ account to post a review and ideally you need to encourage customers to post good reviews about your business, to support your ranking potential and to create a good impression of your business.

If you’d like to know more about this, or would like the Web Marketing Workshop to create or edit a Google+ Local listing on your behalf, please contact us now.

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