The Google Local Business Centre (LBC) is becoming more & more important.
As Google really starts to ramp up its local search efforts, your Local Business Listing will become the cornerstone for a number of services that are coming soon.
So step 1 – go to ‘google accounts’ & set up your free Google Account. This gets you access to all of Google’s services & is becoming a must have item (AdWords, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Website Optimizer, Local Business Centre, News, Alerts etc etc)
step 2 – go to the Google Local Business Centre & claim your local listing. It’s a free service & you may find that Google has already written some details about your business (it gets this from the Yellow Pages & a few other places). But if you’re smart, you’ll claim your listing & add some more info (eg opening hours, categories of products & services you sell & images)
step 3 – you’ll probably also want to ask your happy clients to give you a good rating. These are going to be more important in the future, so get started now & start to build up a history – but don’t try & game the system by rating yourself, or asking all your staff to do this… let it happen naturally over time (& maybe prompt a few customers if & when you need to!)
step 4- stay tuned for more updates on this soon & a detailed free guide we’re creating to help you get listed
step 5 – stop reading & claim that listing today. Or watch this first, up to you.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I have a question. I have gone to a lot of trouble to go through my competitors citations and join up with all of the organisations where they get those citations. however, those citations do not show up on my google listings and my informations is still reading as “provided by business owner” instead of clearly being sourced from a trusted site like my competitors are.
This has been going on for months now. Does anyone know anything else I can do?
Regards
Michelle
Hi Michelle,
‘provided by business owner’ is a good thing… it means you’ve claimed your local listing & added to it, rather than just relying on the data Google gets from Yellow, True Local etc
Couple of things you can do:
- continue to get good reviews from your guests
- read a great blog like this one on Google maps: http://blumenthals.com/blog/
- & improve the overall SEO of your site (check out Aaron Wall’s great info at http://www.seobook.com)
Hope that helps,
Mike