Is there a cafe near here?
Could you recommend a notary public in the city of Lawndale?
Where is the nearest beauty salon?
All these questions have something in common. All of those are searches that people make of location-based businesses. These searches have a growth of 34% each year and 43% of these searches are carried out in Google.
If you own a business and your business does not appear in the first places in the Google search lists, rest assured that you are missing the opportunity to obtain those new customers.
Now you are wondering what I have to do to get these new customers to fill my business? To achieve that you have to make sure that your business appears on Google when people are looking for the services or products that you provide.
The good news is that if you follow the next steps, designed specifically for local businesses like yours, you will be able to appear in Google results.
Step 1. Claim your business in Google listings
If you have not already done so, this is where you should start, in 2014 Google launched the “Google My Business” platform to help local business owners manage their business information through all Google services.
By claiming your business on Google, you will help people searching on this platform to discover your company, and automatically your business information will appear on Google Maps, Google Search and other Google properties.
You will also have access to a control panel where you can control and update your business information, add photographs of your products and services, to be able to follow and respond to your clients’ reviews, you will have access to the data of the people that interact with your business and you can receive or send messages with your new messaging option.
Having your business listed in Google is essential for any SEO campaign, and if your business is not yet listed in Google My Business then your business simply does not exist.
Step 2. On Page SEO Signals
If we want to have a better positioning in the search engines, the signals we have on our website are a very important factor because it is what most impacts the positioning in the search results.
But what I mean by “Signals on the Web Page”, this refers to the content and the code that you use to create your business website. Optimizing them or making them easy to navigate for the search engines will cause your website to have a higher ranking in the search results for the keywords you have chosen for your company.
The main objective of these signals is to tell search engines, to be more specific “Google”, what services or products you provide and where your business is located.
There are several key components that you need to optimize to achieve that positioning, and that includes:
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- The Structure of your WEB Site
- The Meta Tags of your Title
- The Meta Tags of your Description
- Your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone)
- The Content of your page
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We will see each of these in future articles.
Step 3. Local Citations and Link Building
The local citations are simply the mention of your business on other websites, most of the time they will be constituted by the name of your business, the address, and the phone number, it could also include links to your website.
These quotes from your business are important because they help search engines to decide how to position businesses in local search results, in addition to Google and other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo, use these mentions to verify if business data they are accurate.
This is very important, so wherever your business is mentioned, your business data must always be the same, the question is, where can I get those mentions for my business?
There are many places where you can get those mentions, but the best place to start quickly and easily is through online business directories such as Yell.com, Yelp.com, thomsonlocal.com, etc. If you want a more complete list of these directories, click here to get it.
Think of those online guides as a modern version of the Yellow Pages.
In conclusion, reaching the highest position in Google results can increase the number of customers for your business very quickly.
40% of clicks on search results for businesses locally will be made in the first organic result displayed in Google and 33% of clicks will be made in one of the three businesses listed in what is known as “Google Snack Pack ” This is where Google shows what he thinks are the most relevant business in the response of a keyword, and all this is part of the organic searches (free traffic for your business).
To finish, 73% of people searching for local businesses will click on the first organic results of the Google list.
This is why your business needs to be listed in those results, if you need help, contact us to help position your business organically in the search engines and thus be able to get more customers for your business.
