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!
