Digital Marketing Agency | Barracuda Digital

We’ve talked quite a bit on this blog about how to boost your local campaigns to drive footfall to your location. From location extensions for desktop and mobile, to foursquare and Facebook places, there are lots of tools out there to help local businesses.

The first – and perhaps the best – way to grab local traffic is with a Google Places listing. These are an effective one-pager all about your business. To start with, follow these steps in order to claim your Google Places listing.

Once you’ve done that, it’s important to add a bit of colour and personality to your pages. With Xmas now just a few shopping weeks away, this is the perfect time to give your listing some seasonal cheer. And here’s my top 5 ways to do that:

1. Try using a Google Tag

A Google Tag is a yellow marker that appears for local searches on Google Maps. Tags let you highlight stuff like coupons, videos, photos or offers. Currently available just in the US, you can  create a tag by going to your Places dashboard and click ‘add a tag’. Just choose the type and let it run. At the moment Google are giving them away for 30 days for free.

2. Link to a list of offers

You can include more than one link to your website from your Places page. As Xmas approaches people will be using the web with their present list in mind. You can appeal to that mindset by highlighting a link to the offers that you currently have on. Special offers are usually the single most clicked-on link on a homepage, and the same will apply to your places page.

It’s easy to add additional links. Go to you dashboard, find your listing and click ‘edit’. Then go down to ‘additional details’ and make another column by typing “Menu” in the label. You can then add the URL of your offers page. .

3. Add a coupon

Coupons are a great way to incentivize purchases, especially in the holiday season. Just click the ‘Coupons’ tab and then ‘add a new coupon’ before filling out your coupon details. Create urgency by giving your coupon an expiry date. If you make your Google Places coupon code unique, it will be a great way of tracking the effectiveness of your Google Places page.

4. Add an interesting post

Posts are like mini-blog items – 160 character messages that appear on your Places page. They are a good way to add colour and interest to your page, and bring alive the people behind the business. You can also highlight your post with a Google Tag.

5. Add some people and product images

This might seem like a bit of a cliché, but if you add some themed people and product images your places page can come alive with the spirit of the holiday season. Whether its employees in Santa hats – or products surrounded by tinsel – a little bit of effort goes a long way in getting your visitors into the holiday mood.

6. Make sure your holiday hours are up to date

You might have extended hours on some days. On others you might choose to close. And when do you open for sales? Make your hours clear sot that local customers and last minute shoppers can make the correct decision about whether to visit your shop.

That’s it

A Google Places page is a good source of web traffic and footfall, and is an effective tool to boost Xmas sales. Be sure yours is working hard for you as we head into the Xmas season. Once you’ve put some effort into sprucing up your Google Places listing, take a look at ways to boost traffic to it.

Last year I wrote a blog post about the Google Local Business Center (LBC) – a free one-pager given to all businesses, that includes basic information such as location and opening hours. Google Local Business Center has since been renamed Google Places, and it continues to be a great potential source of leads.

The reason for this is that your Google Places listing can appear in the search results for local searches, and for searches on Google maps.

These searches often have a place in the phrase, such as ‘SEO in London’. The results include a map with place-markers to show where each business is.

Since there are many people searching for local goods and services on Google, your LBC listing can be a great source of leads. The problem is that your listing has to compete with many other local businesses, which means it’s often hard to get it to appear at all.

So how do you make sure your listing appears high up the results?

Google uses many signals to determine the rank of a LBC listing. Here are my 6 tips to help you boost yours to number 1, and to grab the biggest share of that traffic.

1. Claim your listing as a business owner!

Obvious I know, but you need to claim your listing. In order to do this, you need to have a business address in the city that is being search for. There is a LBC listing for every business in the UK. Your LBC listing will exist even before you take ownership of it. But it won’t rank highly until you kick off your optimisation strategy. Follow the instructions in the original post to take ownership.

2. Submit your website to all the directories of local businesses.

Common ones include Yelp, Qype and the Internet Yellow Pages. Make sure you have a listing in any well known directories local to your area too.

3. Use the main keyword that you want to appear for in the title of your listing.

For example, if you are a Southampton based Florist, make sure your listing title has ‘Florist Southampton’ in it.

4. Use your main keywords in your directory description too

Put your product/service keyword and your location keyword in your Google Place Page business title.

5. Put your directory listings in as many categories as possible

You’re often allowed up to 5. The more categories you’re listed in, the bigger the list of keywords your listing will be boosted for.  Note that you don’t have to stick with the categories Google recommends; you can make up new ones. Make sure the categories are relevant though – remember Google likes ‘relevance’ more than anything else. I suggest doing some competitors’ research in Google Maps, by using the keywords you want to be found for, and seeing what some of the sites that are currently showing up are doing, e.g. in which categories they are listed.

6. Add some additional content

This is essential: images, videos, and map content is all loved by Google.

7. Get some good reviews and ratings

This includes an idea called ‘reputation management’, which is all about encouraging the development of a positive reputation.

A key way to do this is to foster good reviews of your product. There have been a few high profile cases where business owners have employed people to post positive reviews about their product in as many place as possible. This is strictly frowned upon, and can backfire on the business owner once everyone becomes aware of the scam.

It’s still possible to generate positive reviews without rigging the system. The next time a customer thanks you for your service, or sends you a positive email, ask them if they wouldn’t mind sharing that feedback elsewhere. You could even point them towards a few relevant reviews websites, and your listings on the directories we’ve mentioned here. You might know of a few local reviews and ratings sites that operate in your area too.

It’s also important to get good reviews and ratings on your Google LBC listing page. There’s a designated place for people to leave reviews – point your customers towards those. A new feature of Google Places allows you to add sentiments to these reviews.

8. Create a map on Google Maps

This is the biggest tip here. Find your placemarker on Google Maps. Click ‘Save to’ then ‘My Maps’ and then ‘create a new map’. Then name the map using keywords that you want to be found for. Shhhh now. Don’t tell anyone about this trick.

9. Associate your local area code with your phone number

Not a lot more I can add to that instruction!

10. Ensure continuity

If you move address or change phone numbers you have to update all your local directories listings, otherwise there will be duplications of your listing which are frowned upon by Google and you’ll be competing with yourself. Make sure that your address and telephone number are written the same way on every place you are showing up  online.

And that’s it.

The Google Local Business Center gives you a handy one page listing that lets potential customers know all about your business, and is the cornerstone of your Local PPC campaign. This listing can appear for local searches on both Google and Google maps. Take control of yours, boost its rank, and it can be a valuable source of leads.