Google Local Map

Google’s local map listings are eminently practical for customers searching for products and services like yours. Google Local Places is becoming ever more important to local businesses as the Internet become the place of choice to search for local products and services. Statistics show that over 60% of people will search primarily on Google for a local choice BEFORE then even step out of the house, or an even more popular trend is to do this search on their mobile device. This is because they can find a great deal of data necessary to make a decision, such as contact information for your business, photos and videos of the business, directions, customer reviews and more.

Here’s how it works: If you search for a type of business and a city, for example, “car dealerships in Winchester, VA,” you’ll see the Google map displayed prominently on the right column of your search results. You’ll find the dealerships on that map among the organic results displayed. Even if you don’t type the region and simply search for “car dealerships,” you’ll also see the map and the organic results that populate that map. So you can see why it’s essential for a business to not only be represented on the map, but to also rank at or near the top!

Being listed on Google Places is an important part of your local search strategy. If you don’t have one, you should contact us straight away to create your account. If your business is visible on page one of Google Local Maps, you will see a nearly immediate and serious uptick in the amount of calls, visits to your business and traffic to your website.

We will setup a great description of your business along with any other useful information that will help market it to potential customers. To begin with, we will include basic contact information such as your address, phone numbers, general email address and website URL. You can be listed in up to five business categories, so you should take advantage of this and be included in all relevant business categories that will benefit you. It does you no good to drive customers to your business if they have no intention of buying what you’re selling.

Also included are your hours of operation and your complete business profile. We place careful attention to your most important keywords when writing this description. You may also want to include information regarding payment options, such as which credit cards you accept, as well as parking information.  Think like a customer when compiling this information.

All of the steps above are fundamental to location marketing. If you’re in a competitive industry in your region, you’ll need to take more initiative to be found in a location-based search. You’ll need to provide complete and keyword-rich content, and incorporate more advanced SEO tactics as well as registration with citation sites which we do for you.

Ask your customers to review your business and submit their reviews to Google Maps or Google Places. Provide instructions for them on how to do this since there are a few steps involved. Providing these reviews is fairly easy, but if your customers aren’t web savvy they will probably need some guidance. Google will often also include other online reviews you’re received, such as those through Angie’s List or credible review sites unique to your industry.

The SEO rules that drive traffic to your official website also apply to your Google Maps or Google Places website. Building backlinks and paying attention to keywords. Just as you would do with your corporate website, incorporate SEO factors such as meta descriptions, keyword-rich titles, h1 tags and photo tags. All of this is done for your as part of our services to ensure you are ranked high on page one of Google and other major search engines.

Be sure to contact your First Advantage Media rep for more details and to secure you first page Google Local Map listing and start driving traffic to your business now, we already know that you main competitors are. We will literally push one of them off of the Local Map listing and install you in their place!