How To Get Found For Your Services with Business Listings
Do you remember the yellow pages? What a great time to be alive! Every year a HUGE not to mention FREE book of businesses organized by category landed on your doorstep for you to pop open when you are “feeling like pizza tonight.” Unfortunately, the yellow pages stopped circulation in 2009. Today, people find where they are going to eat, or who is going to change their oil with a quick Google (or Yelp, or Instagram, or Bing) search.
A Foundational Aspect of Your Business
It’s now essential for every local or new business to create and optimize their business listings across the web so that when people are searching for their services – they can be found. Here’s the deal, you don’t just want to list your business with the most basic information to check a box, nope. You want to optimize your business profiles across the web to clearly let search engines know exactly what services you offer, and exactly what area you offer those services. This is all about how to get found in search engines for the services you offer, and there’s a method to the madness, here it is:
What Search Engines Want
Search engines have one goal above all else: to make it easy for people to find what they are looking for. Your job as a business owner is to make sure that your website, and business profiles make it easy for search engines to understand what services you offer, and what location you serve.
The Secret to Organic Traffic from Your Ideal Customer
Customers are searching online to answer questions they have about aspects of your products or services. Not YOUR branded products or services specifically, but on a more general level. By writing quality content that answers common questions your customers are asking within your industry, you increase your chances of being found organically in Search. Post this content on your website, social media, and business profiles. Include common search terms (aka keywords) that are relevant to your business to tell search engines exactly what your company offers. Make sure your content is engaging and keeps people on your site and interacting with your content for longer. This shows search engines that you are the real deal, and your business satisfies searchers’ searches.
The Recipe for a Great Business Profile:
The best way to tell search engines what you do, and where you do it, is to create up to date, engaging and complete business profiles, and update them frequently across popular search platforms. Businesses who keep their business listings updated and accurate build authority with search engines!
If you think about it, it just makes sense. A business listing that was just updated would likely have more reliable information than a business listing that has been sitting stagnant for months or years. Search engines want to provide relevant and accurate answers to searchers, and therefore prioritize listings that are current and regularly maintained.
Maintain Brand Consistency Across the Top Search Platforms.
Before you go off and start creating your business listing on every search engine, map, and review site on the internet, save yourself some time with this trick. Kinetic offers a digital business optimization and listing service that publishes your business profile on over 40 search platforms including Google Business Profile, Google Maps, Bing, Yelp, and more with one central location to maintain and update business information. Not only can you save hours of profile creation across the web, you can rest assured that your business can get found in your service area for the products and services you provide.
Tell the World about Your Services
A well crafted business listing profile is engaging, relevant and complete. Your business profile should be littered with keywords that will notify search engines about what your business provides to its customers. By including a thorough service list alongside a well written description, you help to improve your relevancy for those searches! You also want to provide all of the pertinent information that will help your customers find you and utilize your products or services by including daily services hours, contact information, and location.
Craft a Strategic and Relevant Business Profile
The best way to know what terms to include in your profile is by conducting keyword research to identify what terms your audience is using to find your services, or better yet what terms your audience is using to find your competitors’ services. Armed with these gems, you can strategically include relevant keywords in your profile to improve your ranking potential.
Having relevant keywords in your listings signifies to search engines that your business is a great candidate to answer a searcher’s searches about those services! And what do search engines want to do? Provide relevant search results to search inquiries.
Define Your Service Area
Getting found in your local search is much easier when you let search engines know specifically what areas you are conducting business. Include up to 20 cities, zip codes and counties along with the state or province they are in on your business listing. Keep your priorities straight, and list the most important areas first! Distance is a local ranking factor in search engines, so be sure to tell search engines your location!
Include Images, Logos, and More
Nothing is sadder than a Google Business profile that has an oddly sized, pixelated logo, and a picture of a building (taken by Google Maps Street View no less). Include high-resolution images of photos of your logo (i.e. your front door, someone holding a logo’d sticker, your beautiful building sign, etc.). Add photos of happy smiling customers, examples of your work, or your materials like your branded services vans. This will help tell the story of your brand and make your profile look professional and engaging. Always check the latest Google Business Profile photo and video guidelines before uploading images and videos.
Post Keyword Rich Updates to Regularly
Once your profiles are optimized across the internet, you can help your rankings in Google search by posting updates on your Google Business profile page. Use keywords from the keyword research you conducted when writing your company profile in each post. Include a relevant image, and link to your website to boost traffic. Posting regularly with relevant keywords helps to build authority in Google Search!
Build Social Proof by Promoting, Monitoring and Responding to Reviews
Finally, another important factor for ranking in search is prominence. This is related to reviews. Search engines factor in how many reviews you have, and how many positive reviews you have. It is important to ask your customers to write reviews for your company, and it is also important to quickly respond to those reviews.
Using a Reputation Management service to see all your reviews across your business listings can help to monitor and respond to reviews quickly. By creating a branded review request landing page, you can filter negative reviews to your email, and positive reviews directly to your Google Business page, or whatever platform you want users to write reviews. Having a QR code available wherever your customers frequent in-person plus creating a strategy to entice happy customers to write reviews is a best practice to build prominence.
Hire Professionals and Focus on Your Business
When you have a business to run, local listings, keyword research, copywriting, and responding to reviews is probably the last thing on your list to accomplish for the day. Get it done, and get found in local search for the amazing products and services you provide by outsourcing the work to a professional marketing agency. When you hire Kinetic, you hire quality. Contact us to learn about how we can take care of your local listings, and reputation management for you.
