Google Places Tips – Our Top 10

By claiming a free Google Places listing for your company and optimising it properly, you will drive more traffic to your website.

The local business listings together with a map often appear above the natural search results for many local search terms e.g. “driving school Edinburgh”.

• Add a link to your website

A fairly obvious tip, but make sure you put a link to your website in your Google Places business listing. This should always be a link to the homepage of your website.

• Complete all the information

It doesn’t take long to complete a Google Places listing so you should ensure that all possible information is included such as payment methods and parking at your shop or offices.

• Use your keywords in the description

When you’re entering the description of your business for your listing, make sure you include relevant keywords. Using the example of a driving school in Edinburgh again, you may want to add “driving lessons Edinburgh” and “driving school in Edinburgh” to your business description.

• Don’t spam

In Google’s own guidelines for places listings it advises against spamming such as adding keywords to the end of your official business name and writing a business description that is just a list of keywords and nothing else.

• Treat your listing like a mini website

As well as completing all the text fields for your listing, you should also add relevant images for your business along with any video content you may have.

• Ask customers for reviews

Customer reviews also play an important role in the optimisation of your Google Place listing. Again, using the driving schools example, you may want to ask some of your current pupils or those who’ve passed with you to leave a review on your listing.

• Add a coupon to attract new customers

With Google Places listings you can create printable coupons with offers and discounts which can help you to attract new customers as well as having an overall benefit when it comes to making your listing as optimised as possible.

• Keep it local

Remember that Google Places is for local business listings, so if you run a business in a small town 30 miles from Edinburgh, then use the name of that town and not Edinburgh as your location.

• Don’t create multiple listings

If you have a service based business such as driving tuition you should create just one main Google Places listing rather than having one for every area and town that you cover.

• Monitor your statistics

Within your Google account you can monitor the statistics for your listing to see how many impressions (times it has appeared) it’s had and the number of people who have clicked through to your website as a result.

If you liked this article you may also want to read 10 reasons why your website may be failing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Local Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.