If you want to do just one activity that will take you approximately 5 minutes of your time and yield you the most customers for free, this is that one thing you should do. Immediately.
Some quick statistics to get our conversation started:
- 53% of all Google searches are local or location based
- Over 70% of mobile searches are local or location based
When does your location matter?
Easy: any time a person is trying to find a product or service close to where they are or based on its proximity to a location. For example, an web design company in Birmingham.
For location-relevant businesses these types of searches are the most important queries that you can hope to win. These queries aren’t you trying to beat out your nationwide or global position for search engine rankings, but are instead highly local-based and often immediate in their conversion from a query to a phone call or physical customer at your location. In some industries (such as restaurants) this conversion percentage has been found (for smartphone users) to equal 30% immediate conversions and 60% conversions within an hour, and 80% go on to eventually make a conversion.
30% conversions immediately and 60% conversions within an hour. These aren’t window shoppers, these are people that are immediately converting to become customers of yours. And guess what they’re using to conduct these local searches? Google Map on iOS (Apple) or Google via their Android phone. The top results are being pulled from Google Places.
Google Places is now Google+ Local
This part may be confusing, but Google used to have a service which is still operational called Google Places. You might have created your business listing in this service, it still exists, you can still edit your existing listings, and in fact you can create new listings.
This is not Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
To be perfectly clear, this is not search engine optimization. This is not part of your website, nor does it comprise of making the content in your website more accessible or optimized for search engines to spider. This is entirely about giving Google the best information possible about your business in their “yellow pages” directory, keeping the profile updated and active, and enabling Google to match queries with the best results. And when the query is a local or location-based search, Google will use this information before using standard search engine results (which is where your SEO might be a factor).
For more information, please feel free to contact Evolvenet Web Design in regards to Google Places and how we can help you set this up.
