Get your business in Google Maps local pack, known as “3-Pack”, is critical for your business, it increases traffic and sales that allows people to learn more about your business, a higher rankings causes increase revenue and increase engagement as well which is all good things that you want.
You want to ideally show up in Google’s local pack which is right underneath the map, this helps you earn trust from customers, this helps you get better star ratings over time, assuming your product or service is great and it’s free Google advertising and helps you stand up from the competition. So let’s set up your Google My Business.Get your business in Google Maps, Now!
- Step one, set up a new Google account, if you already have one you can use that and access your Google My Business login.
- Step two, head to google.
- com/business, click on Manage Now, then the next step is entering your business name. You want to avoid accidental duplication, I know that sounds silly but a lot of people make this mistake.
- And did you just open up a new location? If so, add a new Google My Business profile to existing business as well.
- Step four, enter the address of the business location only if where the business engages with people face to face.
- I’m not talking about virtual places, you want to more so pick that address of your physical location and your service area business that delivers good if you are ticked that box at the bottom of the form,
- Step five, specify the service areas that you guys offer and then from there, Google can accurately surface your business for searches in those areas.
- Step six, choose the right business category and no research your competitors to find the most accurate categories for your business before you do this. You want to pick the one that’s most relevant towards you. For example, Wendy’s and McDonald’s, yeah, they offer ice cream but they’re not a restaurant, they’re more of a fast food or hamburger joint. So pick the one that is most relevant towards your business.
- And then the next step would be to add a contact phone number, your website URL, if you don’t have a website, I highly recommend that you create one and Google will even give you the option to create a new Google website.
- Step eight, complete your Google My Business verification, this is important and you have a few options, postcard verification, phone or email each of them works. So now what’s next.
It’s time to optimize your Google My Business. So how do you optimize it?
- first you want to add photos and videos to your listings. If you add photos and videos, people are much more likely to come to your store and you also want to write a compelling business description. What is it your business does?
- Why should people choose you over the competition, right? And you want to use Google My Business Q&A’s as well so that’s the question and answers to understand your audience.
- So let them ask questions and then of course you’ll want to answer them as well, shows that you care. Then you want to create Google My Business posts to showcase offers and promotions and discounts that you could be having for things like Black Friday or holiday shopping or anything like that.
- Like Valentine’s day specials and then of course you want to add service menus and product collections. So doing all of this will help you get the most amount of traffic and it also encourages your most loyal customers to also follow you on Google My Maps in case you change. Locations and you’ll be shocked at how many people change over time.
Next, you need to start requesting and managing Google reviews, review ratings are the biggest driver of clicks to the local SERPs. So make sure that you focus on them and 82% of customers read online reviews for local businesses. So it’s important that you also try to get great ones.
Don’t fake it if people give you bad reviews, try to fix what they’re saying so that when the future you get better ratings in the future. And you also want to view search insights, this will give you ideas of what’s happening to your listing and how you can better optimize it.
You want to post statuses and pictures, you want to update your business hours, your locations, your contact information descriptions, if any of that changes as well.
With Google, they dominate the search in your marketplace and it’s important to pay attention even when it comes to local SEO because there is a ton of traffic but Google isn’t the only search engine to keep in mind, there’s also Bing even though it’s not as popular, it still gets a ton of searches and Bing places is free to set up, it’s simple, it’s one time and they even give access to analytics. Get your business in Google Maps, Now!
A quick step for you Bing gets over a billion, unique visitors a month and 12 billion monthly search requests, that’s how popular Bing is.
- So with Bing places you want to showcase your business to online customers, businesses, your Yelp reviews, your business hours, your contact information. So let’s optimize your listing.
- So go over to Bingplaces.com, click on new user Bing to get started and then locate yourself on Bing places.
- Make sure you’re not already listed, very important because someone on your team could have already done this and then specify your location, claim it and if you already have a business, if not create a new business.
- Step four, it’s time to set up and create account, pick or create account that all the relevant people have access to within your business, notably specifically the business owner if you’re not the business owner.
- Step five, enter your business address and details, Bing places will try to locate you on the map, note that do not display this address check box at the bottom, check this box if you want people showing up at your address but in most cases you do but this is the option for you in case you don’t want people showing up.
- Step six, select your business category, you have the option to pick multiple categories and at the end, pick which one you want to display as your primary category.
- Step seven, set up your contact details, make sure it’s accurate and you’re thorough about it, pay attention, make sure you didn’t mess up here those are little things like that can really mess things up in the future. For social listings, place a full URL of your social pages, not your handle and on the right side of the screen, you can preview what customers will see.
- Add your working hours. Now you can tailor the hours for each day of the week. If you’re not open, let’s say late on Fridays, they can accommodate that, they’re pretty flexible, just like Google and then from there, you want to make sure you add your logos, snapshot of your storefront, examples of your products services, photos of your team and then you’ll want to verify your listing.
Bing will send you a unique either by email or a phone call or a Snail mail, all this is important. Now the next one we have is Facebook for businesses. Facebook is the largest social media platform, they provide an authority, a third data backlink to you, even if it doesn’t help with search in your rankings, that’s okay and it helps with social proof and it’s easy to set up.
So 90 million small businesses use Facebook, that’s huge. So it’s time to create your Facebook business page.
- Step one, go to facebook.com/pages/create, select the type of page you want to create, click the get started option. Typically most people click the business or brand page.
- Step two, enter your business information. Use a business name that people are likely to search for when trying to find your business.
- For the category, type the word or two that describes your business and then Facebook will then offer some suggested options and then click one of their suggested options.
- Step three, apply your profile and cover image, make sure is that those photos aligned with your brand.
- Step four, create your username, also called your vanity URL so that way people can easily find it on Facebook and join the community as well which is very important in the long run, because this helps make your business page more popular. You want to add your business details and then you do this by going to settings, then keep page info and share information about your business like your category, your contact information, your hours, location, all that kind of good stuff.
- And for the next step, tell your story.
- A story says a thousand words, right. It’s not just a picture, a story does as well. And stories are the age old marketing technique that’s been around for thousands and thousands of years. At a longer description to your business, this will help people find you when they’re doing searches on Facebook as well and tell customers what your business has to offer.
- Next step, create your first post, your first post should add value to your visitors.
- Like if you’re a sandwich shop, start talking about your sandwiches, maybe some of the raw ingredients you put in there, why you guys are different? What people think about it? You can do some fun stuff like a sandwich blind tests, what sandwich do people prefer?
- The next step you want to publish your page and invite it to other people like your friends, to other friends of colleagues, co-workers and invite your existing Facebook friends to like your page, use other channels like your website and Twitter profile to promote it and add a follow us logos and promotional material all throughout everything so that way people go and follow you on Facebook when they visit your store.
There’s more with Facebook, there’s also location faced with business page locations is not intuitive, does your business have more than one location?
Wondering how to promote separate businesses to local audience? Well, let’s set this up. So let’s set up locations for your page.
- Step one, I want you to log into business manager, stuck business locations, under assets, select your Facebook page and then click get started.
- Step two, if your main page has an address, you’ll see a warning message, if your main page has an address, you can add this address as a location.
- And then for the next step, click Add Locations to set up your first Facebook page location. Then from there, you’ll see three options to add locations, you can either manually type in address, upload a CSV, migrate an existing page into a location manager. So pick the one that’s most relevant for you and step five, edit and optimize your Facebook location pages. You want to go to your business locations dashboard, you can view all your location pages and add any missing details like a store office or whatever it may be.
So are you ready to even grow even more?
Apple has over 1.5 Billion active devices. Now there’s Apple Maps, even though it’s not as good as Google Maps, it’s still improving and getting better over time but you still want to be in there because so many people use them.
So let’s go over setting up your Apple maps. First off, create an Apple ID if you don’t have one, just takes a few minutes and it’s free to register then you want to log into your account and then you want to access Apple Map connect and this is where you can add your business to Apple Maps and then search a secret business is already listed.
I know it’s probably may not be but still just double-check this and doing so can prevent double listings which will hurt you in the future if you have one and if Apple maps list your business, claim it, review the information to ensure it’s accurate and then click claim this place boxing, claim your business listing.
If you can’t locate your business, just click, Add a New Place to start and then accurately, enter your business information, make sure it’s keyword rich because people search for keywords.
If you are looking for more help. please feel free to contact YLP Marketing for help.
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Read More: GOOGLE MY BUSINESS – GOOGLE STREET VIEW