Have you heard, last month Yellow Pages announced that after 51 years of producing their catalogue the final ever edition will be released in January 2018? The business directory company will print 23 million copies of the final edition, as they believe they will be kept as pieces of memorabilia, reminding their owners of the time before everything was digital….. but everything is now digital!
In a survey, it was found that 60% of people use the online business directory, Google Local, opposed to 13% of people using Yellow Pages online, which makes Google Local, by far the most popular online business directory. According to Google, 18% of local searches result in a conversion. An example of a local search is when a user searches Web Design Leeds in Google, the search engine will display all web designers in the specific location of Leeds, above organic listings. This is beneficial to businesses as they can both find relevant potential customers in their local area. So, if you haven’t already, now definitely is the time to list your business on Google Local, which is done through Google My Business (GMB).
You can simply create your GMB account and claim your business. Although, if you are wanting to capitalise on your Google Local searches, and rank at the top of the Local Search Engine Result Page, then you will need to optimise your GMB listing and thankfully that’s where Ascensor can help.
Google My Business Optimisation
Here at Ascensor, we offer a service to set you up and optimising your GMB account. Is there anything we can’t optimise? One aspect of the optimisation is geo-locating your images. This means that your images will give Google significantly stronger location signals, which assures Google your business is relevant to the area, where it’s located. As a result, this will strengthen your position on Google Local, making the site more competitive and will provide a greater quantity of traffic to the site.
Another part of our Google My Business optimisation service is that we upgrade sites to include location specific code. Adding this code creates a pinpoint location of the business in the code. So once the site is crawled, Google recognises the exact location of the business, which again strengths your positions on Google Local.
Google has made several updates to GMB and other Google Products, with the aim of making businesses use a verity of their service, through their new dashboard feature. For this reason, we will also set you up with a Google+ account as once again the search engine, deems companies using both GMB and G+ as reputable, therefore, improving their rankings.
What are you waiting for?
For the majority of businesses 80% of their business is done from their local area, so ask yourself, do you see the value in having a GMB account? And would you to have an optimised GMB account, to give you an advantage over your local competitors and most importantly do you want it to give you maximum return on investment? If the answer is yes to either of these questions get in touch.