Search Engine Optimization

Getting Started with Google My Business

November 20, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

About Google My Business

Google My Business (or GMB) is a tool that lets you control how your business appears when potential customers search for your products or services on Google Search and Maps. You’ll be able to add your business name, location, hours, and even photos. Once you’ve successfully created your GMB account, you’ll be able to monitor and reply to customer reviews and have access to free analytics.

About Local SEO

If you know about Local Search Engine Optimization, then you might be a small to medium business owner (SMB). We recommend that every SMB have a Google My Business (GMB) listing — from store, office, to place of service.

Local SEO is all about increasing search visibility for businesses that serve their communities face-to-face. — Moz.com

If you’re new to local SEO, GMB is a great place to start marketing. Your business listing on Google is the first thing potential customers see when they conduct a local search, so it’s important to have accurate, up-to-date, optimized information about your business on the world’s most popular search engine.

Do you need help creating a Google My Business account? Follow these steps for success.

Getting Started with GMB

Step 1: Create a Google My Business Listing

Log into the account you want to be associated with your business
Go to google.com/business and select “Start Now” in the top right corner.
Enter your business name
Hit Next

Choose the category that fits your business best. For example: News Service

Decide if you want to add your physical location to Google Search and Maps. If you have a physical location or don’t mind sharing your storefront with the world, you’ll receive more traffic with an address.

Click Next

Do you offer your services regionally, nationally, or globally? Then select Yes, I also serve outside my location. If not, select No, I don’t.
If you selected yes, now you can add the areas in which you serve. For example, New York City, New York or USA (continental). You have the option to create multiple service areas if you want to define your regions of service.

Add your contact details. This is how customers will contact you, so include your phone number and website if possible.
- You also have the option of creating a free website based on your information.
- Select “Get a free website based on your info” to get an automatically built and updated web page based on your GMB listing.

Once you’ve completed all of these steps, you’re ready to select Finish. Now you’ll have access to:
- Promote your business with photos and posts
- Track business analytics to understand your customers better
- Respond to any customer reviews

But wait. There’s more to do. Verification is the next step. Are you able to take calls from your listed phone number in order to prove verification? If yes, select this method.

- If you can’t take calls right now, select Postcard by mail. Google will send you a postcard by mail with a verification code.

Now that your account is set up, you can add your business hours. Then click Save.

Add a business description of up to 750 words. This is where you can tell the world how your business stands out from your competitors and offers a unique service.

Add relevant photos of your products and services to your GMB page. Real photos are often better than stock photos.

You are now listed on Google my Business.

Congratulations. Although technically, your profile is now complete, you’ve got more work to do. Stay tuned for our next article about advertising with Google Ads!

Why businesses need to have a Google My Business Listing

Your listing on Google is the first thing people see when they search for your product or service, with the apparent exception of pay-per-click ads. When someone searches for a product or service you offer, they are more likely to choose yours if your GMB page is fully optimized.

Google is one of the most trusted resources available today, and you want to be found! Google My Business offers you brand awareness, great referrals, sales leads, and even more if you learn how to use GMB properly.

Comprehensive Marketing for Guaranteed Results

Now that you’ve created your Google My Business account, you might be looking for ways to get even more results. The recommended next step is developing a website with responsive and mobile web designs, strong search engine optimization (SEO), fast website speed, and other important methods in mind.

While developing a Google My Business account is something you can do on your own, you’ll need some help developing your business website or refreshing your existing site, from an experienced, trusted web developer. That’s why SMBNow.com recommends Xponex Web Design. With Xponex, you’ll be able to expand your marketing, reach new customers, increase conversion rates, grow profits, and develop a solid brand. Xponex Media even offers free consultations for all of their clients.

See what others have said about Xponex and a portfolio of their past customers.

The Importance Of Local SEO To Your Small Business

August 20, 2015 by Zack Duncan Leave a Comment

Local Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an important benefit that a lot of marketers and businesses take extreme advantage of. While SEO, in general, is important, local SEO will continually be significant for enterprise companies for the following reasonings:

It’s a Way to Generate Profits
If you follow these processes and steps correctly, local SEO will not only expose your business online but will also make you more profit. If you get the top spot of search engine results, then this will dramatically and immediately increase traffic for your website.

A recent study showed that 78% of local mobile searches and 61% of local laptop searches resulted in offline purchases. In just the U.S., there are 7 billion different and unique local searches monthly. So if you use local SEO, make sure you’re posting the right content to the right client base, so it drives online searches to your business.

Mobile and Wearable Tech is Growing
Showing in 10 countries, including the U.S. and Japan, there are more Google searches that take place on a mobile device rather than a PC. Now that there are more and more wearable devices coming out these days, like smartwatches, then realistically there will be more searches made on the go. Therefore, using local SEO will only benefit you since local searches will become more frequent.

CEO of HostGator Adam Farra says, “Society today is already transitioning from PCs to mobile Internet usage, so local SEO will be a necessity, not a ‘nice to have’ in the very near future.”

It’s a Way to Build Links and Share Social Media
Another major reason for using local SEO is the opportunity to connect two business firms together. It creates a potential partnership between the two and helps with social sharing as well.

Marketers can build and share their links with local search engines like Yahoo Local, YP, Google Places, Foursquare, Yelp and Bing Places. By doing this, it could help your business, as well as another business, grow and meet new clients. Meeting with local bloggers or other website owners could change your way of thinking in your business in a more positive manner. You could even plan an event or new business idea with them for new, different profit-making strategies.

It’s a Way to Extend Your Business

Your website is actually another location for your business and with the help of local SEO, you’re basically helping users connect with your business. It helps easily locate and study your website and also helps update it with info and more content which is important in growing your business in the future.

TouchBistro, an iPad POS app for restaurants, used its website to show its partnership with Uber and also provided a $20 promotional credit to customers who ate at TouchBistro affiliated restaurants in Toronto. Restaurants that participated were given promotional cards with codes to give to customers, who then had to download the Uber app to receive their $20 credit.

You Expose Yourself to Local People
The absolute main reasoning for using local SEO is that it targets the people within the area of your established business. This helps small business owners who just started their enterprises if they use SEO.

Smaller businesses can use online resources to advertise in local classifieds, such as using Angie’s List, Craigslist, or Yelp. If you use sites like these, make sure you use high-quality videos and images or other important items that advertise your business.

Using these steps and processes with local SEO will benefit you and your business or new business. Constantly adding or changing the content on your webpage will help keep it up to date as well as help provide your clients with a better understanding of what your services, products and promotions provide.

Content originally published here

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Why SEO is important for SMB

July 9, 2009 by admin Leave a Comment

Search Engine Optimization is so crucial to small businesses and yet so few even try SEO. When a customer wants to find a product in their local area their first instinct is to Google it. If your website does not appear on the first page of Google for their search query then you are probably going to miss out on that sale.

With the help of SEO your business will be able to reach a countless number of customers from the web. The problem with SEO though is people want results right away. Most businesses will try it for a couple of months and when they see no results they give up. SEO takes time to build up your website and make it turn from nothing into something that will show up in Google’s search results.

SEO doesn’t have to break the bank either. There are thousands of ways to promote your businesses website for free on the internet. Whether its creating a creating a blog, using websites like Twitter, Myspace, Digg, Youtube, Facebook, and Linkedin. Using social media websites for SEO is a cheap and cost effective way to get your business out their and help establish your keywords.

The key part of it all though is making sure you have a great website. Your website needs to be top priority. Whether it’s doing it yourself or paying someone to help, it is crucial to make sure your website is setup correctly so that it looks good to customers and that it is designed so that Google will have it show up in the search engines.

The entire goal here is to draw customers in using search engines. It may seem at first impossible to climb to the top of Google’s search results for your keywords, but if you stick to it you can attract a giant customer base just by using the web. The fact is if you are not doing it your competitors are.