Top 3 Mistakes Businesses Make On Google

A mini public library shaped like a house with a green roof and the door open

Congratulations! You’ve launched your business website and you’re ready to shine on search. A digital home base sets up your search engine optimization (SEO) to help drive traffic to your business online.

Just by creating a business website, you’d expect to be recognized as a business on Google, correct? Not so fast! There’s still work left to be done in order to be recognized by Google.

We’ve identified three common mistakes that will prevent your business from being highly ranked and easily findable on Google. Fixing these mistakes can drive traffic — and increase sales.

With over 25% of local searches being affected by the information on Google My Business listings, we want to make sure you’re not making one of these top three mistakes. Not only are we breaking it down for you in the simplest of terms, we’re including a local Tampa example, the Blind Tiger Cafe — who has seen success since we set up a Google My Business account for them.

Mistake #1 – Not verifying your business

Some business owners assume that once they have a website, social media, and a brick and mortar location, their business will automatically be added to Google My Business location searching. This is not true.

Google expects all business owners to go through an additional step of verifying their business, which will give them confidence to increase their placement in the search rankings. By having the account verified under the owner’s name and address, you will have access to easily modify your own listing, post pictures, respond to reviews, and more.

Take Blind Tiger for example: because they took ownership of each location on Google My Business, they are able to post photos of their latte art, answer questions posted by customers, and respond to reviews. The cafe has earned first page search placement due to these small actions taken.

By verifying your listing and continuing to post updates, a business will get more interaction, which drives Google to trust its credibility. Plus, this automatically sets each business up to have an account through Google to log in and check the status of listings and respond to reviews. The more control, the better.

Mistake #2 – Not having reviews

Now that you’re verified and set up on Google My Business, it’s time to tackle your second obstacle: collecting reviews.

This can be a long process. Providing good customer service and asking customers to write you a review will help you organically increase your number of reviews (and hopefully, your rating) over time.

Fortunately, marketing companies such as Digital Neighbor have the capabilities to support your business and catapult you forward with reviews at a quicker pace.

One of our services involves setting up a communication strategy with every single customer either through text or email — while you train your staff to ask for reviews or by giving them intrinsic and extrinsic incentives each month. Having a robust approach like this will help you gain reviews, improve your ranking at a quicker pace, and give customers more confidence in your business.

Our case study, The Blind Tiger Cafe, has successfully gotten over 700 reviews for their main coffee shop location in Tampa just by setting up reviews within their Square payment application. After a customer purchases a coffee and pays with a credit card, they’re automatically sent an email and asked to rate their experience. This catches the customer while they are still in the mindset of enjoying their coffee and helps the coffee shop master the art of reviews.

Mistake #3 – Duplicating listings

As a business owner you may assume that by having multiple locations or multiple listings on Google, you may improve your rankings — but it’ll actually do the opposite.

The standard rule of thumb of SEO and Google is to avoid duplicating content. Google views this as plagiarism, which can damage your rankings. Google can also tell when a business owner tries to deliberately oversaturate search results, which is actually against their terms of service.

Rather than post duplicate content, Blind Tiger maximized their content and the ranking of each one of their singular listings by deleting any duplicates and being sure to optimize their main listing as often as possible. With Google listings, less is more.
At Digital Neighbor we specialize in Google My Business, because we want all of our neighbors to be successful. We’re here to help by taking a free pulse check of your current Google My Business status. Please reach out to a neighbor!

Previous Entry Next Entry

Find out how to Identify Engaging Content Topics

Over the previous 20 years of digital marketing evolution, one standout phrase has continued to stay relevant and move brands forward. That well-known motto is: “content is king.”

If you talk to any big-ticket agency, they’ll pitch you on more content, content, and content. Here at Digital Neighbor, we agree that content is a great strategy to increase SEO performance, improve social media engagement, and drive traffic to a businesses’ website.

But not all content is high-quality and engaging, so our goal is to provide our digital neighbors with real tips on how to select the right topic for your next piece of content. As an added bonus, we’ve highlighted a local business who we think is doing exceptionally well in the area of relevant content: Sacred Jade Yoga, a local St. Pete studio.

Tip #1 – Set a goal

With every aspect of marketing, the first step should always be to set your KPIs (key performance indicators). The hard work of creating engaging content, curating and editing it, adding in related keywords, and amplifying the SEO on the backend is all for a bigger picture. You want to make sure these efforts are worthwhile for you and your team by setting measurable goals.

Maybe your goal is to measure performance based on clicks to your site from a third-party page. Maybe you want to measure performance based on how the content affects sales. Whatever the goal, you can use metrics as a benchmark for your digital performance.

At Sacred Jade, we can tell that one of their goals is to be creative and connect with their audience at a deeper level. Their Journal includes unique and high-quality content on moon phases, the healing nature of Yoga, and even a mind-healthy meal recipe. This range of content connects with the values of their current audience and may even help them reach a new audience that’s interested in these topics.

Pro Tip: Do a keyword analysis before you start writing to be sure you’re including the correct terms to help drive traffic or attract the right audience. You can simply use the Google Analytics tool and search under the “Organic Search” tab to find out the relevant top searched terms for your article.

Tip #2 – Stay Ahead of Trends

The keyword in this tip is to stay “ahead” of trends — you don’t want to get left behind by your competition. Within the world of content today, trends are moving at lightning speed. One strategy to keep your business cutting-edge is to set the standard of how to engage your audience on trending topics.

Think about saying “strike while the iron is hot!” To adapt that to your marketing strategy, you need to keep up with the news and dive into topics quickly to be part of genuine conversations. With the 24-hour news cycle and real-time social media, some hot trending topics right now might be old news by the end of the week.

Jade Yoga is more than just on-trend: they’re trend setters. They focus on broad topics that are interesting to their audience and may even spark new conversations about Yoga in general.

Content doesn’t need to be hyper-focused on what your brand does or who your team is. It needs to connect with a wider audience and teach them something. Later on, they’ll decide on their own that they need your product or service because you fit their values and can fulfill their needs. By having a variety of engaging content, Jade Yoga’s Journal is engaging & uplifting.

Tip #3 – Understand Your Audience

As a business, you should understand who your customer is and what their needs are. When selecting content topics, these needs should be at top of mind. Would your clientele read this or find this information interesting? Is this information valuable to them, even if they don’t currently use your product or service?

Think about the types of questions your clients usually ask. Sacred Jade does this well in their content: they clearly understand what topics their readers are interested in. They think outside of the box of just yoga-focused content. But all of these topics still link back to Yoga and having a healthy body and mind. Sacred Jade made it as easy as possible for their audience to understand what they do and how they fit with their audience’s needs and values.

Pro Tip: You can ask your audience what they’re looking for! This invites them to take a more active role by speaking up and having a voice. As a business, you should always be looking to engage your audience, so asking for their input is an easy way to start. A great strategy is taking your frequently asked questions and creating content for each question.

Here at Digital Neighbor, we specialize in “content, content, and content” — and that’s because we believe that PEOPLE are king. We want all of our neighbors to be successful with their content strategies and beyond.

We’re here to help by offering a free consultation of your current content and SEO strategy. Please reach out to us to connect!

Previous Entry Next Entry

Want to learn even more?

Whether you have a simple SEO question or want to have a deep conversation about your digital strategy, we’re all ears. Contact us today for a chat or to learn how we can put our digital marketing expertise to good use for your business.