Posts Tagged ‘Local Search’

Google My Business: New Features For Local Businesses

May 6th, 2020

Your Google My Business (GMB) page is one of the most important things for your local SEO. it lets your customers know the basic information about your business like its address, phone number, operating hours as well as special offers. For businesses that cater to a local customer base, it goes a long way in establishing your business’ identity. Any SEO agency will suggest creating a GMB page as the first step in local SEO. For years businesses have been reaping the benefits of GMB profile. Recently, Google has announced some new features in the GMB profile. In this article, we will discuss what these features are and how they can be helpful.

GMB Clap Creative

New Google My Business Features

Booking New Appointments

GMB now allows your customers to book an appointment with your business directly from your GMB profile. Google now allows you to add an appointment URL to your profile. This URL can be of any webpage through which your customers can fill out a form to book an appointment. Most businesses are using their contact page URL here, however, you can also use your homepage here as well.

This feature will be the most useful for restaurants and doctors clinics as well as any other business that works around appointments or scheduled bookings. This feature gives the customers the power to schedule appointments as per their convenience while helping businesses keep better track of their bookings.

GMB Q&A

GMB profiles now give the option for your customers to directly ask you questions about your products or services on the GMB page itself. This is a great way for your customers to connect with your brand and get answers to some common questions that other customers could also have. You can answer these questions asked by the customers and both the questions and answers will be visible to everyone who visits your GMB profile.

You and your customers can give thumbs up or down to questions and answers to ensure the quality of your answers. This feature saves a lot of time for you if you are getting a lot of the same questions again and again. New visitors will be able to get these answers from the previous answers itself.

Direct Messages

GMB profile now gives customers the power to directly message businesses through their profile. This creates a clear line of communication between you and your customers. You can set up alerts when you get new messages and give a prompt reply. This also helps your ranking in search as Google always gives preference to more responsive businesses.

You can link a mobile number with your GMB profile and receive customers’ messages on that and reply to them through the phone as well. These days, customers do not live staying on long customer service calls so giving a direct messaging option to your customers will improve customer experience and conversions.

Expanded Product/Service/Menu Editor

When the menu editor was originally launched by Google, it was only for the restaurant business. Google now has expanded this editor to add products and services as well so that it can be used by a wide variety of local businesses to promote their business. This will help small-medium businesses reap the benefits of GMB profile more.

This feature was introduced to keeping local businesses in mind. Businesses can go into their GMB profile and add a catalog of their products and services. On the desktop, these products will be visible on your Google My Business page, and on mobile devices, they will be shown in the search results. Better product descriptions can also give your SEO performance a boost as well.

GMB Posts

Google My Business page posts have been around for years. However, they have recently added a new feature that allows you to add multiple images to a single post. This is great for businesses that want to showcase more images of their products for customers to choose from. This will make your posts more attractive to customers and get more eyeballs on them on your GMB profile.

During this Covid-19 pandemic, the GMB posts have added an additional option for businesses to share Covid-19 updates with their customers to let them know how the business is coping and how it is pivoting its operations in these times.

Conclusion

The purpose of Google My Business profile is to give local businesses the opportunity to reach as many customers online as possible and build a reputation for themselves both online as well as in the community. Make sure you update your GMB profile using all the above features so that your customers can get the most relevant results and information about a business on Google.

If you have more questions about how to improve your local SEO or want to get a free consultation, contact us today.

Reasons Why SEO is Important for Your Small Business

June 26th, 2019

If you own a small business, you might think why SEO is important and how it will affect your business to gain popularity on an online platform?… Well, surely it is important because your visitors will have fantastic user experience with the help of SEO services.

Many companies and brands know they need search engine optimization for their websites. This certainly improves a website’s overall searchability and visibility, but what other real value does it offer?… Check Below:-

Builds Trust and Credibility

The goal of an experienced SEO is to establish a strong foundation for a user-friendly website with a clean, effective user experience that is easily discoverable in search. And to build trust and credibility of the brand and its digital properties. Many elements go into establishing authority regarding search engines like Google. But authority is accrued over time as a result of elements.

Establishing that authority will do more for a brand than most, if not all, other digital optimizations. Problem is, it’s impossible to build trust and credibility overnight so, it is earned and built over time.

It Enhances Your User Experience

Search engines have learned how to interpret a favorable or unfavorable user experience, and positive user experience has become a pivotal element to a website’s success. Customers know what they want. If they can’t find it, there’s going to be a problem. And performance will suffer.

A clear example of building a strong user experience is how Google has become more and more of an answer engine offering the sought-after data directly on the SERPs (search engine results pages) for users. Quality SEO company incorporates a positive user experience, leveraging it to work in a brand’s favor.

It Increases Engagement, Traffic, and Conversions

With the rise and growing domination of mobile traffic, local search has become a fundamental part of small and medium-sized businesses’ success. Here comes the Local SEO that aims at optimizing your digital properties for a specific vicinity, so people can find you quickly and easily, putting them one step closer to a transaction.

Local optimizations focus on specific towns, cities, regions, and even states, to establish a viable medium for a brand’s messaging on a local level. SEO pros do this by optimizing the brand’s website and its content, including local citations and backlinks, as well as local listings relevant to the location and business sector a brand belongs to. To promote engagement on the local level, SEO pros should optimize a brand’s Knowledge Graph panel, its Google My Business listing, and its social media profiles as a start.

SEO Helps You Understand the Environment of the Web

With the always changing environment that is the World Wide Web, it can be a challenge to stay on top of the changes as they take place. But staying on top of SEO includes being in the loop for the major changes taking place for search.

Knowing the environment of the Web, including tactics being used by other local, comparable businesses and competitors, will always be beneficial for those brands.

Conclusion:

Google’s algorithm has many ranking signals. They have made noticeable efforts in the past few years to emphasize the signals related to engagement. Metrics like dwell time, time on site, pages viewed per session, and page load speed all been emphasized as having greater importance for Google to rank websites. And all is the part of Search Engine Optimization. With it, your local small business grows and expand to the worldwide market.

Optimize Local business For Search – How to Prepare for 2015

November 27th, 2014

With 2014 coming to an end, search predictions for next year 2015 are already seen on the horizon. The annual local search engine ranking factors were a little predictable in the beginning of 2014. But as the year comes to an end and Google’s Penguin update having rolled out, more and more webmasters are planning for the year ahead.

What Mattered in 2014 and how Things will take Shape in 2015

Traditional factors are taking a center stage in search engine optimization. Although, Google places and citations still carry importance the shift is now heading towards high quality links and on-site signals. Even the latest Penguin didn’t hit the local websites heavily as it hit the websites with bad link profiles. In the end, the next year too requires that you should have an ethical approach to SEO and your users must have an awesome user experience. Stop fooling the nerds at Google and try to keep pace with the changing search dynamics.

Best SEO Tips for 2015

Awesome User Experience

Giving true value to your customers is at the heart of every search engine. It’s not easy being awesome in such a competition. But you can take care of few factors such as:

  • Home Page Content – When customers land on your home page, they must get a clear idea of your brand. Also, search engines need to know what you are all about. Just some banners and simple text won’t do it. You need to add some great content and good images to make the right impressions.
  • Thin Content – Never have thin content on inner pages. All the pages must have relevant content to go with the service. People want information on pages and you need to provide them the same with valuable content.
  • Keyword Spamming –This is a no brainer. You simply cannot stuff your content with keywords and expect it to be red by your visitors. Get rid of the junk content and provide true value to your readers with informative content.

Local Factors

  • Include city name in your title tag. Never over optimize your title tag and unnecessarily stuff keywords or your services.
  • Mention city and state name in your H1 tag as well. Right in the top, the users must know that you serve their area. This increases the local relevancy.
  • The page content must also include city and state name. In your page’s content, you must relate to a local area and mention the services you provide in that area. Know the local neighborhoods and add some long tail keywords.
  • In image alt tags, it is suggested to clearly mention city and state information. This adds another local content element to your search factors.

There are many other factors such as structured local data and logo optimization that still carry significant importance. Not to forget that mobile experience is paramount. Mobile users are now equivalent to desktop users and this market simply cannot be ignored.

Hope you had plenty of information to get started. When it comes to SEO, sky is the limit and you simply have to keep exploring. Happy 2015 SEO!