If you’ve worked with Google in the past you’ll know just how
hard it is to rank for Google Places for many searches. It’s also
apparent how important Google Places have become – they often take up
the top parts of the page for a search term. So even if you rank first
for a certain keyword, you could see three to six Google Places ranking
above you. The question is, what tricks can you use to secure your spot?
1. Set Up
First of all you have to set up your business page, which can be done
by completing your profile on Google Places. All you need is a Google
Account which is free and easy to set up, then onto the more interesting
stuff.
2. Citations
If you don’t know what a citation is (you should if you’re reading
this), it is basically a mention of your business on another site. As
close as you can get to the exact match of your Google Places listing
the better. So if you have your link, description, contact information
or anything else, make sure it matches to your Google Places page. This
will also help your organic rankings as well – it serves a dual purpose.
3. Get Listed
This is important to get the best citations. They can come from pages such as Yahoo, Superpages, Insiderpages, Angie’s List and
many more, but these are the ones that are regarded as giving you the
most juice. This will allow you to give Google all the relevant
information about your business. You will want to make sure that your
details are comprehensive because filling out as many fields as possible
can really help with your rankings for all different kinds of search
phrases.
4. Make Sure of the Accuracy of your citations
You will need to go back and check that all your existing citations
are correct, as well as the ones you are getting listed – there is no
point in getting listed with the wrong information. Make sure your
citations have accurate names, addresses and the correct phone numbers.
It has even been thought that providing a physical address can help your
placing. It is important to ensure that your website details are
correct but more importantly that the data on your website is correct
and the same as these citations.
5. Build more local links
Not simply the general SEO link building back to your site, but more
local links that mention your business name, address, phone number and
URL. As with normal SEO you can include them in forms of social media
and posts, but it would be beneficial to get these links from other
sites such as bloggers, business sites and directories because they act
as a sort of review.
6. Reviews
Now onto reviews and as hinted above, reviews are strong links that
show trust. Reviews are important to both getting the citation indexed
and ranked highly in Google as well as propelling the Google Places
listing. You will want to get as many reviews as you possibly can on as
many different sites as you can, this will help a lot in improving your
ranking. You can get people to review by encouraging customers and
suppliers to do it, or by securing mutual agreement reviews from
businesses in the same industry to help get the review ball rolling.
7. Make updates to your places page
Just by changing the main areas of your Google Places page, you can
create a jump in rankings. You don’t have to edit the images and videos,
but in my experience, just by editing the description and related areas
can make a difference.
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