Optimise your Google Place!

In the second of two articles about Google Places, we review the best ways to manage and optimise your local business listing on Google, to help improve your local search visibility and to see how users are viewing your business details. This follows on from last month’s article where we discussed the importance of claiming your existing Google Places listing, or creating a new one to ensure that your business is taking advantage of this feature.

Once you’ve claimed or set-up your new Google Places listing, there are a number of ways to optimise this in order to increase your ranking visibility. Google provides an interface for listing owners to edit and review the performance of their listing, which includes ways to improve the potential visibility of your business details.

The first point is that you should ensure that you have a business listing right away, as Google gives prominence to older, more established listings. Once the listing is created, the address of your business relative to the centre of the designated search location is important. Businesses that are closer to the “centroid” used to have an advantage, though not so much anymore, although searchers are also likely to be looking for companies closer to their search location.

You need to list your business name in its correct format and add your address details, which will also be used to verify your listing (see last month’s article). Include one or more phone numbers, an email address and web address, plus you can add a business description, which should be brief and include relevant search terms in the text.

It’s also important to ensure that the 5 categories that are selected for your business are relevant and keyword focused. You have to choose at least one category from Google’s existing list, but you can also add other relevant category titles that include the keywords that you most expect your local customers to use to find your business.

Another important factor in optimising your listing is to ensure that there are numerous references to your business in local business directories, as these “citations” re-enforce your business as a well-established local one. The number (rather than the quality) of local reviews on your listing also helps its ranking.

An optimised Google Places listing should aim for 100% “completeness” by including photos, opening times, payment information, videos, other information fields, coupons and more. You can track the “completeness” level of your listing by logging into your Places account, plus you can see data on user activity in the past, such as the number of impressions that your listing has received (which reflects search activity) and how many “actions” have been completed (i.e. the number of users clicking on your listing to visit the website or to find out more information about your business).

So as Google Places listings are becoming increasing important, it’s imperative that your business is represented by a fully-optimised one immediately. If you’d like more information, or details about how we can help your business to get the most from a local listing, contact us now.

Leave a Reply