Improve Your Business’s Local Listing

You might have heard about recent changes in the online search engines and how important local listings are, but what does it mean for your business? Just go into Google and type in any type of service or business followed by a city. This would look like this, "plumber Houston" or "electrician San Diego". Your search results will no longer be just a list of websites.

The local listings as well as a local map appear above the regular organic search results. Notice it's the same 7 or local listings on the front page that also appear highlighted on the map. That's 2 links on the front page that they didn't pay for. There customers can easily find them without costly online pay per click advertising or yellow pages ads. Now I'm not against paid ads for your business if you are tracking them properly but you can't argue against what just a few extra free leads a week from the internet could do for your business. Here are a few tips that your business can use to help improve its chances in the local listings.

1. Make sure your business's physical address is on your site. Simply putting your address on your website can have a positive affect. You also should have your business hours as and phone number all on the front page of your website. Make sure they are in text and not a graphic. Also be careful to list your hours of operation, phone number, and address exactly the same way every time you put your business's information somewhere online.

2. Add pictures to your Google Local Listing recently you can also add a webcam feed. While a webcam certainly wouldn't apply to all businesses it could work great for a pet shop or any other business that wanted to show it's current stock to users online.

3. Use social media. Twitter and Facebook have simply become to powerful to ignore. This is much important that boosting your rankings though. Odds are that your customers, happy or not, are talking about you online. Your business needs to be in the conversation. Social media is also a great way to keep old customers coming back and acquire new customers with special deals and coupons.

4. Actively pursue reviews from your satisfied customers. Online reviews of your business now play an incredible role in your ranking online. It's important that the reviews be genuine. Never higher someone who promises to increase your reviews over night and certainly don't try to do it yourself.

5. Check to see if you have actually claimed your google listing. One last thing you can do is if you haven't done so already you need to claim your local listing in google places. This will not only help you do better online but it will protect your local listing from being hacked as well. You used to be able to do this over the phone but more and more you will have to wait a few weeks for Google to send you a postcard through the mail.

This certainly isn't everything that can be done to help your business online but it's a pretty good start.