Does Your Business Have an Enhanced Free Google Local Listing?

Are you looking for an easy way to increase website traffic to your site and help with your search engines rankings? Try beefing up your company’s Google Local Listing. There are several bits of information you can update and customize and best of all, it’s free.

To get started, first type your company’s name along with the city and state where you are located into a Google search field. Most likely your company and basic contact info will be listed along with your location on the map. Don’t worry if you didn’t personally create the listing, Google scans other directories like the Yellow Pages to find and index businesses.

Next, click on your listing to see what information currently exists. You can then click on “more” which will take you to an extended view of your listing. From there you can click on “Add or edit listing”. You will be asked at this point to go through a validation process with Google Local Business Center to make sure you are qualified to edit the listing.

Once you’ve received the proper validation, you can login and add or edit the following fields:

  • Title (Be as descriptive as possible. This does not necessarily need to be the name of your business. Use words that customers would likely be searching for if they were looking for your product or services.)
  • Description of your business
  • Types of customers you serve
  • A link to your Web site
  • Email address
  • Languages spoken
  • Accepted payment methods
  • Hours of operation
  • Keywords that describe your products or service
  • Up to 10 photos
  • Up to 5 videos

The Google heat map below illustrates that users are far more likely to click on listings at the top of the page than any other spot on the page. Because the Local Listings appear at the top of the page it is important to add as much information as possible to your listing so that users will be more likely to click on your Web site or visit your bricks and mortar store.

Another interesting tidbit is that Google recently changed the way the Local Listings appear. Formerly, you had to type in the name of the business or service you were looking for along with a city and state.  Now if you don’t type in the name of the city or state, Google uses your IP address to approximate where you are searching from and then provides the closest listings that fit your search.

If you enjoyed this post you may find our post about the difference between SEO and Pay-Per-Click valuable or learn more with our SEO Made Simple series.

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