Adding Citations Can Double Your Google Map Exposure

Citations will help to make the most of your Google’s Local Business Search Listings in Google Places. Let our SEO Management Team create a killer listings in Google Places for every business location you have. Why? As the screenshot below illustrates, Google Local can and often will dominate what’s seen above the fold?

With Web estate like that, you can gather large amounts of traffic if you can list prominently for targeted keywords. With this as our goal, let’s take a dive into how to enhance your Google Local listings?

Google Local Map

How My SEO Management Team will set-up or claim your Ownership Instantly

Google will add listings to their local results without any user submissions. It takes some creative work to pull it off, but it can be done. With that said, we will check and see if your business is already listed in there. If so, we need to claim ownership for you and create revisions and verify all of your contact information.

I Encourage Honest Reviews

As a local business owner, you need to understand that local search is a viral or socially driven tool. The more reviews and feedback users provide, the more likely Google will be to promote your listings. Consider reviews on local search to be similar to PageRank for organic business listings. It’s not the main ranking criteria but there are enough similarities to suggest there is a connection. As the cliché goes? If there’s smoke, there’s fire.

So – Just how can you go about encouraging reviews on Google Places? First off, start by simply asking your customers or clients. You will never get anything if you don’t go out and ask for it. While asking a customer helps, motivating with an additional discount at the register can work better. Reward their positive reviews with a coupon, savings or free promotion.

These are just some random thoughts, but I think you get the idea. You need your customers to give you solid reviews, and by giving them something in return, you will accelerate that entire process.

Look At The Every Merchant Network for Local Online Business

Google’s understanding of local search results reach beyond the information you provide directly to them.

For example EveryMenu.com is a source for local restaurant information, and Google will show these sources in a listing. In a similar fashion, SuperPages can often be found providing data where Google is lacking.

The Every Merchant Network team will study your industry in other cities and try to research what tools and data sources are out there. We then check on the “Details” tab of full listings to see where data could be pulled in from. In most instances the listings that show up on Google are on the partnered site verbatim.

Since I’m throwing out clichés to help make some points, let’s quickly use the saying “You need to spend money to make money”.

There are third party services such as ReachLocal and EveryMerchant.com that specialize in local search listings and their optimization. You of course pay these providers, but in return they’ll get your listings up to par with the competition and even provide some clear reporting on how effective your listings are.

Another up and coming platform we use is EverySalescall.com that charges only for calls your business receive.