Category Archives: Reputation management

300+ Free Google AdWords Best Practices Guides & Tutorials

So you finally started using AdWords and… there is still ten times more things you don’t know than you do know pay-per-click advertising.  Google wants to help.  They are after all deeply invested in your success. If you have the patience and perseverance to wade through a couple of layers of Google help pages, there lies a wealth of Google AdWords Best Practices guides and video tutorials.

To save you time and help you find exactly what you are looking for, here is an expanded list of Google AdWords Best Practices guides and video tutorials.

google-adwords-best-practices

300+ Google AdWords Video Tutorials and Hangouts

Looking for video tutorials?  Google AdWords has a YouTube Channel with 200+ video tutorials and Google Hangout recordings for the more audio/visual inclined learners.  Watch instructional videos, demonstrations, and Hangouts on Air featuring AdWords specialists.

Google AdWords channel playlists include:

Google AdWords Best Practices Guides

The AdWords Best Practice series is a search engine marketing tutorial that helps you get the most out of your pay-per-click budget.  Written by Google, based on internal Google AdWords data, and vetted by AdWords creators – this series is a must read for PPC beginners.

google-adwords-best-practices-guides

Keywords & Targeting for Google AdWords Campaigns

Choosing the Right Keywords for PPC

Keywords connect your ads with users and their searches. Effective keyword management helps you reach the right customers and grow your business.

Reach the Right Audience with RLSA

RLSA helps put your ads in front of highly qualified customers who have already shown interest in your business or products. This guide covers how to tag your site, set up remarketing lists, and bid effectively.

Optimizing Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads reach customers as they search without you needing to stay on top of a detailed keyword list. Learn how to get the best possible performance from your DSA campaigns.

Optimizing Google AdWords Ads

Create Effective Text Ads

One of the most important things to get right in your search ad is the creative, or messaging, you put into it. Better creatives improve ad relevance and drive more qualified clicks.

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Using Quality Score to Guide Optimizations

To provide a great experience for both users and advertisers, Google measures the quality of your ads. Ad quality is a part of Ad Rank, so the better your ads are, the more competitive you’ll be in the AdWords auction.

Enhance Your Ads with the Right Extensions

Ad extensions appear alongside your ads and deliver additional information to users. Extensions are also part of Ad Rank, so the better your extensions are, the more competitive you’ll be in the AdWords auction.

Bidding, Attribution & Conversions with Google AdWords

A Guide to Bid Adjustments

Bid adjustments are an integral part of AdWords that can help you save time and improve performance. This guide provides an outline for how you can align your bids with your business goals to make smarter bid adjustments.

Automating your Bidding Strategy

Automating your bids with AdWords can deliver better, more informed bids while saving you time. This guide covers the benefits of auction-time bidding, then goes deeper into testing and optimization.

Adjusting Bids to Maximize Profits

Maximizing profit should be the performance goal of every AdWords account. Use bid testing to learn how you can maximize profits for your account.

Optimize for Cross-Device Conversions

It’s imperative to understand and act on, how your marketing drives actions across phones, tablets, and desktops. This checklist covers what you can be doing to take full advantage of cross-device conversions in AdWords.

Beyond Last-Click Attribution

Going beyond last-click attribution for your Search ads in AdWords helps you understand your customer journey. This guide offers best practices on choosing an attribution model and making changes to improve your campaigns

Google AdWords Account Management

Expand Your Business Globally

Expanding your business to new countries unlocks new opportunities for your AdWords account. This guide offers best practices on exporting your business to new countries with AdWords.

Using Display Ads & True View Video Ads

Reach Past Visitors with Display Remarketing

Turn window shoppers into buyers. Programmatic Remarketing on AdWords Display helps you engage site visitors with personalized ads even after they’ve left your site. Learn how to set up effective tags, remarketing lists, bids and ad formats.

Create Effective Google AdWords Display Ads

Three of the most important elements of a display ad are the message, image and design. This checklist outlines how to create effective display ads so that advertisers can improve conversions, brand recall and engagement.

Making the Most of Display Advertising

Make the most of your display advertising on the Google Display Network. This guide offers best practices for connecting your audiences with relevant ads across the web.

Press Play on TrueView Video Ads

There have never been more opportunities for brands to connect with consumers through the power of video. This guide covers the key ways you can use TrueView video ads to support your overall performance goals.

Tailor Your Ads with Dynamic Remarketing

Dynamic remarketing lets you re-engage previous site visitors with ads containing products or services they viewed on your site. This guide covers how to create and optimize high-quality business data feeds to power remarketing.

Mobile & Local Ads in Google AdWords

Create Effective Mobile Ads

Smartphones are an integral part of how people search and browse the web. Here are 14 tips on mobile ads to help grow your business.

Drive More Calls to Your Business

A customer’s interaction with you can be carried out across different channels: online, in your store or over the phone. This guide will cover all of the ways to drive phone calls to your business and optimize them for success.

Drive Offline Sales with Online Ads

A customer’s interaction with you can start online and then finish in store. This guide will show you how to enhance and target your online ads to drive offline sales and how to optimize them for success.

Finding Actionable Insights from AdWords Store Visits

Store visits conversion data can help you to understand how your customers interact with your brand across different channels. Here are three reports that you can run to help you take action on this data.

Drive Conversations with Message Extensions

Message extensions are an efficient, convenient way to initiate and extend conversations with customers to unlock an entirely new segment of customers that prefer to use messaging to communicate. Here are some tips for connecting with users via messaging.

Google AdWords Shopping Campaigns

Shape Up Your Shopping Campaigns

Shopping campaigns give you the chance to feature product images and information directly in your ads. This guide covers how to create high-quality data feeds, structure effective campaigns, set your best bids and simplify the mobile shopping experience.

Get Your Search and Shopping Campaigns Ready for Holiday Success

Set up your Search and Shopping campaigns for success during the holidays. Planning for the season’s increased shopping demand can help you win more customers over this critical time period.

Ramp Up Your Search and Shopping Campaigns to Survive the Holiday Season

Check out our guide to Get Your Search and Shopping Campaigns Ready for Holiday Success with tips to ensure your product data and campaigns are in tip-top shape for the holidays. Once those are locked-and-loaded, it’s time to build on top of what you have to optimize for the busy season.

Evaluating Your Holiday PPC Ads

Assess how your search campaigns did over the holidays. Analysis of your past performance will help you prepare your campaigns for the next holiday season.

Google AdWords Reporting & Analytics

Optimizing AdWords with Google Analytics

Both AdWords and Google Analytics offer insights into the performance of your campaigns and those insights get better when you use GA + AdWords together. Improve your bidding, messaging and performance through these analyses.

Finding Actionable Insights through AdWords Reporting

Smart analysis and reporting in AdWords highlights what matters to you and your bottom line. That information can directly improve the performance of your account. This guide covers how to surface the right insights and turn those insights into action.

Grow Your Business with Google AdWords

Get strategic advice with Google’s Best Practices Series to optimize your AdWords campaigns. Visit the Google AdWords Channel to watch videos that teach you how to use AdWords to grow your business. Whichever way you learn best, there is a Google AdWords Best Practices guide or video tutorial to help you get more out of AdWords.

 

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Zach_Color_Trans_small_CroppedAbout The Author

Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.

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New Integrations with Dental Practice Management Software

Reputation Loop integrations with dental practice management software make it easy for dentists to accumulate and publish patient reviews.

We are excited to announce that Reputation Loop now integrates with even more dental practice management software.  Dental offices can now use one of the most powerful Reputation Marketing platforms available to build a positive reputation that attracts more patients.

Integrations with Dental Practice Management Software

  • Dentrix (G4, G5, G6)integrations-with-practice-management-software-logos
  • Eaglesoft 14 – 17
  • Open Dental
  • Softdent
  • PracticeWorks
  • DSN
  • Easy Dental
  • FPC
  • Daisy
  • Suzy
  • Dental Vision
  • OCS
  • Genesis

If you own or manage a dental practice you know monitoring and optimizing the online reputation of each location is crucial for future success and growth.  It is nearly impossible for a practice of any size to effectively monitor their online reputation, much less build and protect the kind of online reputation that attracts new patients.

Reputation management has become a crucial business function, and reputation marketing is influencing how patients pick their dentist. Utilizing Reputation Loop’s automated platform provides an almost hands-free process that takes all the hard work out of managing your reputation and marketing your five-star status.

Automate the Entire Patient Feedback and Online Review Generation Process

Reputation Loop has pioneered a new way to easily leverage the power of a positive online reputation and integrations with dental practice management software make the Reputation Loop dashboard accessible within the software.  Once a patient has had an appointment, Reputation Loop gets to work automatically contacting the patient for feedback.

This software automates the entire reputation management and marketing process, from collecting reviews and protecting your online reputation, to promoting a strong five-star online presence and gaining new customers. Automatically gathering feedback from recent patients, Reputation Loop also monitors the major review sites, notifying the dental practice of negative patient feedback to provide needed protection of both online and offline professional reputations.

SEE MORE REPUTATION LOOP INTEGRATIONS

Here is how Reputation Loop’s integrations with dental practice management software work:

  • A patient attends an appointment
  • Patient receives a simple single-question survey by text or email
  • Positive responders leave reviews on review sites you choose
  • Negative responders fill out a feedback form about their experience so you can address unhappy patients before they post online
  • Receive email and text notifications for new ratings and reviews posted online in real-time
  • Manage patient feedback and monitor online reviews in one simple dashboard
  • Promote your best reviews on your social media profiles

integrations-with-practice-management-software-dashboard

Additional benefits of using Reputation Loop include business listings management, employee performance tracking, and API integration with dozens of top review, business, social media, and directory sites.

Get a free demo of how Reputation Loop does industry leading reputation marketing by visiting http://ift.tt/1VG3uGU. Call 866-700-9330 or email sales@reputationloop.com for more information on how Reputation Loop can generate reviews fast while promoting and protecting a stellar online reputation that attracts new patients.

 

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Zach_Color_Trans_small_CroppedAbout The Author

Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.

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Small Business Trends Presents: 10 Halloween Promotions to Try This Year

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Latest Google My Business Updates 2016

Google My Business is one of the free tools Google provides to businesses to manage their online presence in search and map results. Smart business owners have already verified and optimized their Google My Business listing. As one of those smart business owners you should periodically check on the latest Google My Business updates.  Google is continuously updating the Google My Business platform with enhancements that let you do more with your account and provide more information to your customers.

Learn what’s obsolete, what’s new, and how you can do more with the latest Google My Business updates.

Add Multiple Owners to Listings

This is probably the most useful of all the Google My Business updates from the last few months.  You can now add multiple owners to individual locations and Google My Business accounts. As the owner of a listing, you can invite additional users to own or manage a listing.  This lets you share listing management task without having to share personal account information.  Only owners can add or remove users, but assigned managers can remove themselves from the listing.

There are three types of users an owner can assign, with different levels of access to the Google My Account listing – owner, manager, and communication manager.

google-my-business-updates-access-capabilities

Source: Google Support

Use Map View to Look at Multiple Locations

Viewing all of your locations in list view is the best way to make edits to your listings.  You can also view your listings in map view which shows your locations plotted on a map.  This is useful to take a look at your locations at a glance.

To access the map view click the map icon at the top of your list view.  This switches to map view with your locations show.  Locations are color-coded based on their status.  Blue locations are published listings, and pink listings are either inactive or require some action on your part.  Map view is a good way to quickly check the status of your listings.

google-my-business-updates-map1

Manage Google Updates Automatically Made to Your Locations

As of August you can accept or discard Google updates for individual fields in bulk. Google uses information from various third-party sources to ensure location information stays at accurate as possible.  That means the information you provide can sometimes be reported as incorrect.  When Google updates your listings, you will see them listed with a “Google updates” status.  Google can update your listings at any time, and those updates appear live on Maps and search results.  Check often and review listings with “Google updates” status to ensure the information seen online is accurate.

If you have Google updates to review, you will see a Google updates box at the top of your page. Select an option from the dropdown and pick the boxes next to the locations you’d like to review. From here you edit updates individually, accept updates or discard updates.  You may not be able to accept or discard Google updates in bulk if the listing isn’t enabled for download or you don’t have enough access to the listing and can request more access.

If you’re updating locations using your bulk upload spreadsheet, you can import your locations without resolving Google updates. You can import a spreadsheet, and if you haven’t changed a particular field since your last upload, Google My Business will ignore that field. Your data won’t change, and Google updates for that field won’t be accepted or discarded. If you import a spreadsheet and you have changed a field, the new field value will be accepted and will overwrite both your old value and any Google update associated with it.

New Hours Format for Bulk Upload Spreadsheets

You can use bulk upload spreadsheets to verify multiple business locations at once.  As of August, there is a new format for the “hours” column.  If you bulk upload with spreadsheets, you will need to make this format change since the old format is no longer supported.  For open hours of the business enter hours for each day of the week in their respective column. You can enter hours in AM-PM (HH:MMAM-HH:MMPM) or 24-hour (HH:MM-HH:MM) format: 09:00AM-05:00PM or 09:00-17:00.

google-my-business-updates-hours-format

You can get a current template by clicking the plus sign at the bottom right of your account screen, clicking to “Import Locations,” and the clicking to “Download the Template.”

 Other obsolete fields no longer supported in the bulk upload tool include:

  • Ad Icon URL
  • Ad Landing Page URL
  • Alt Phone. Alt phone is now “Additional phones.”
  • Categories. This field has been replaced by “Primary category” and “Additional categories.”
  • City is now “Locality.”
  • Description
  • District is now “Sub-locality.”
  • Email
  • Fax
  • Hours. Each day of the week now has its own column for opening hours.
  • Main phone. The main phone is now “Primary phone.”
  • Mobile phone. If a mobile phone number is the best number for your business, add it as the “Primary phone.” Otherwise, add it to the new “Additional phones” field. Any numbers previously specified as mobile have automatically relisted in the “Additional phones” field.
  • Payment Types
  • State is now “Administrative area.”

Google My Business API Update

The API update won’t affect many small business owners as the Google My Business API is designed for developers who write applications to handle Google My Business data on a large scale for chains and complex Google My Business Accounts.  A business that has a third party manage their listings with the API should know that the new version has a few new notable features:

  • You can now subscribe to push notifications when you have new reviews.
  • Map URLs are included in location responses, allowing users to link to Google Maps.
  • You can now add URL attributes such as a restaurant’s menu.

Help Customers Find You with Google My Business

With Google My Business you can manage the information Google search users see when they search for businesses like yours, or the products and services that you offer. You can also respond to customer reviews and post photos of what you do.  Monitor your listings and keep your information up to date to ensure when people find your business on Google Maps and search they have access to information like your hours, website, and street address.

 

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Zach_Color_Trans_small_CroppedAbout The Author

Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.

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The Importance of a Positive Online Presence for Local Businesses

Find out WHY a positive online presence is so important and HOW you can build a positive online presence for your local small business.

Many small businesses, especially those with physical locations that serve just their communities, underestimate the importance of building and maintaining a positive online presence.  The internet covers the entire world, so why is the worldwide presence of your small local business so important?

Studies have shown that over 80% of online searchers follow up via an in-store visit. That means that your local customers are using the internet to find businesses around, and your next customer is more likely to find you online than driving by your storefront or billboard advertisement.  If your business lacks an enticing web presence, you risk losing business to competitors found in the same internet search who have ensured they have a positive online presence.

local-positive-online-presence-followupWhat Does It Mean to Have a Positive Online Presence?

Even if you well aware of how important your online presence is, there may be a need for clarity around what exactly a positive online presence entails.  Your business’s online reputation is made up of everything online, including things like unsolicited reviews, web site comments, complaint forum entries, “best of” and “worst of” lists, blog post mentioning your business, social media comments, and photos tagged with your company name.

Your online presence is comprised of three main factors when looking at how future customers find you in search:

  1. Content you create such as web pages, blog posts, and social media that can show up as links in search results.
  2. User generated content that shows up on third-party sites such as Yelp or ComplaintBoards.com in the form of reviews, ratings, and complaints.
  3. Mentions of your business by third party websites such as the Yellow Pages or Chamber of Commerce (also known as citations).

Don’t assume that your online reputation is being managed by your marketing efforts. Your website and the advertisements you send out locally or online do not encompass your web presence. Internet searches, social media, review websites, and complaint forums are top of mind activities and destinations as consumers search for the best service at the best price.  Your company can provide a great product, with exceptional customer service, and at unbeatable prices but if it is not perceived as such online, and social signals show any negativity, new customers will hesitate to give their trust or money. When trying to influence new customers, it is vital to create a positive online presence and control the way you appear in these three areas.

local-positive-online-presence-use-internetWhen a customer searches for the type of service or product you provide, in your city, does your company show up in search results?  Does he see a professional provider with great reviews?  If the answer is no to either of these questions, chances are high you just lost a customer.

Why Do I Need Online Reputation Management?

Ensuring a positive web presence has many benefits for small businesses.  Online reputation management actively establishes your credibility as a reliable business and gives your company a competitive edge over others in your industry.  It helps you position your business as the first and best choice when customers are researching online before making a decision where to spend their money.

Reputation management also ensures you are controlling much of what is being said about your business online and lets you influence those conversations towards positive messaging.  Your online reputation serves as 24/7 advertising, getting the word out about your company to customers searching on the internet, specifically consumers in your community searching for your specific service.

The importance of managing your online reputation is clear considering online reviews, business social media profiles and company websites rank higher in searches and provide exposure to a wider pool of prospective customers when sound SEO practices are combined with effective reputation management techniques and tools.

local-positive-online-presence-incompleteHow Can My Local Business Build a Positive Online Reputation?

Building a positive online reputation for your small business is vital to your local success and future revenue.  While this may sound like a lot of work, a business should look at concentrating on just a few impactful activities to start.

Monitor Your Local Business’s Online Reputation

Monitoring your online reputation is no longer a “should do,” it is a “must do!”   There are online reputation monitoring services and tools that will let you know what customers see online.  You can opt to manually do this yourself, but whatever your method you need to monitor the online reputation of your business, so you always know what customers see online.  With that knowledge, you can work fast to correct or handle any negative information circulating about your business in the form of negative reviews, complaints, or inaccurate business information such as wrong phone numbers or addresses.

Get More Five Star Feedback and Manage Online Reviews

Online reviews are huge as they not only show up in many places online and rank high in internet search results but more importantly, consumers trust these more than any web content or advertisement you could create and disseminate.  Properly posted and promoted online customer reviews drive new business to your door more effectively than almost every other marketing activity. Think of how many times you have seen a one-star review and decided to purchase from that company.  I would guess close to never.  That is why you need to incorporate a system for soliciting, monitoring and responding to online reviews.

Claim your profiles on the major review and local listing sites.  These profiles also show up high on search engine results, so it is vital that you be in control of how these profiles are filled out.  Yelp, Google My Business, Angie’s List and similar sites let you claim and fill out your profile with ease.

Once you have established your profiles, you’ll need to work on getting real customer reviews posted on the sites that matter most to your customers.  You’ll want to develop a system, with a dedicated manager, that works at acquiring feedback, works with customers who are less than very satisfied and pushes five-star reviews to the review profiles you have set up.

local-positive-online-presence-review-content

Just one more thing for you to add to your business owner To Do list, right?

Luckily, review management is one of the business operations you can easily automate with effective reputation management services. With the right software, it can be as “simple as set it up and forget it” to give every customer the opportunity to give you feedback or link directly to your review site profiles with just one click to leave a review.  Honestly, you’ll wonder why something so useful as automated customer reviews management, when customer reviews are so vital to the success of your business, doesn’t come with your business license.

Manage the Business Listings For Your Local Business

Both people and search engines use your online business listings to find you (online and offline) and verify that you are a legitimate business.  Search engines use business listings to deliver accurate business information to their users.  Ensuring accurate and consistent information is contained in your business listings gives your business the edge over your competition by helping you rank higher in the local search results that attract new customers.

positive online presence accurate listings

People use business listings to get your phone number and address information to find the businesses closest to them providing the specific products and services they are looking for.  Missing, duplicate, incomplete, or inconsistent will inevitably hurt your business, and that is why it is so crucial that your business listings be monitored and managed. Read “The What, Why and How of Business Listings” to get a better understanding of what business listings are, how they work, and how you can automate the management of this crucial aspect of your online identity.

Get on Serious about Social Media

Keep it simple, and select just two or three social networks to avoid being overwhelmed in the beginning. The key is to find which platforms your prospective customers and audience prefer and establish profiles on those sites (Twitter and Facebook are general front runners).  Claim your company name, completely fill in your profile, and get a great photo to start to establish yourself.

There are three impactful reasons to claim and establish your social media profiles immediately on the social networks your customers frequent:

  1.  A healthy social media presence is a great marketing tool that lets you promote your brand and your content while creating relationships with your customers where they spend the most time online.
  2. Social media profiles rank high in specific personal name and business name search engine results. If you have little else online that you have created, you can control a lot of what page one is showing about your business.
  3. Profile names are first come, first serve with social networks. Someone could claim your name and your business name, so grab yours as soon as possible. Best case scenario they never use the profile. Worst case scenario THEY manage a profile pretending to be your business and murder your reputation.

Social media marketing is an activity that can greatly enhance your online reputation, but it can become time consuming.  First things first, establish your company’s presence and as you learn the ins and outs of your preferred networks look at starting a manageable social media marketing campaign for each.

Leverage Your Business Blog & Publish Quality Content Consistently

As part of the search engine optimized and mobile-ready website you already have, maintaining a blog does two amazing things: It shows you know your stuff and gives the web crawlers weighty information (links) to include in internet search results about your company or services in your area.

positive online presence more leadsConsistent, and properly search engine optimized, blogging ensures that content, images, and web pages you create and control occupy the valuable space at the top of search engine results for your name and your business. If you don’t love to write, don’t have the time to write, or the budget to outsource your content creation, this may be the hardest thing on the list. However, it is one of the best ways to control what is being seen and read about you online.

Managing your online reputation to create a positive online presence with regular blogging, active social media profiles, review management and marketing, and a search engine optimized website gives you substantial control over what is showing up at the top of search results. You can learn more about online reputation management and steps you can take to better position your business by subscribing to the ReputationLoop.com blog.

 

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Zach_Color_Trans_small_CroppedAbout The Author

Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.

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Google Local SEO Ranking Factors for Small Business

When you do a local search for your business, where is it ranked?  If it is not at the top of search results or not showing at all, there are steps you can take today to start to change that.  Look at the listed local SEO ranking factors for areas where you can make immediate improvements.

local SEO ranking factors

Getting the exposure for your business that comes with ranking first page in search results can be a game changer for small businesses. As Google moved to the smaller local 3-pack, getting to the top of local search results has become harder and more important.

According to Google, local results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence.  They rely heavily on the information in verified Google My Business listings, but also consider all the data that makes up your business’s digital footprint such as links, business listings, citations, website authority, and reviews.  Combined these factors find the best results for local searches on their search engines.

local-SEO-ranking-factors-vist-store-today

Local SEO Ranking Factors

When someone goes onto a search engine with the intent of doing a local search, it triggers a different behavior than a search such as “Siamese twin gymnastics.”  Search engines treat searches with local intent differently because they want to give you the information you need right now to make decisions.  The following local SEO ranking factors have been shown to greatly affect how high your business shows up in those local search results.

Relevance & Prominence

Relevance is how well a business listing matches what someone is searching for when they do a local search.  Prominence refers to how well-known a business is.  Being known offline helps places such as famous museums and well-known department stores show high in search when relevant.  For a local business, Google looks at information from across the web such as links and directories.  The number of reviews and ratings are also a factor in how a business’s prominence is graded.  Ranking high organically in web results is another factor, so don’t abandon your comprehensive SEO strategies.

ALSO READ: 3 Ways Customer Reviews Improve SEO

Proximity & “Near Me” Searches

Proximity is how near or far something is from another thing.  In this case how far each business in search results is from the searcher.  The “near me” search is very popular but searches with a local indicator work with proximity as well.  When the searcher does not specify their location in the search terms, Google just calculates the proximity based on what information they do have on the searcher’s location.

Optimized Google My Business Listings

The Google search engine relies on its Google My Business listings to provide the most relevant search results.  Optimizing your Google My Business listing for local search results ensures that Google has all the accurate information it needs to show your business as a highly relevant search result in the proximity of the searcher.

A business with no Google My Business listing will not appear in the local 3-pack, and it is rare that an unlisted business will rank the first page of local search results. Proximity doesn’t trump other local SEO ranking factors when search engine users do a local search.  For example, the closest dry cleaner does not automatically appear first and may not appear at all if they haven’t optimized for search.  Using Google’s current algorithms, search results could show a location further away that is more likely to have what the searcher is looking for and rank it higher in local search results than the dry cleaners down the street.

local-SEO-ranking-factors-google-my-business

Here is a Quick Google My Business Optimization Checklist:

[  ] Verify your Google My Business Listing

[  ] Verify and manually correct your business location pins on Google Maps

[  ] Completely fill in your business listing – especially categories!

[  ] Keep your hours up-to-date throughout seasons and holidays

[  ] Consistently gather positive reviews and respond to reviews

[  ] Add photos of your products and services to your listing

ALSO READ: How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

If you want a chance at showing up in local search results, you cannot neglect your Google My Business listing.  Earning enough reviews to have a five-star rating show up next to your high ranking business listing ensures your business is picked over the competition.

local-seo-ranking-factors-visit-store-nearNot Showing in Local Search Results?  Work on These Local SEO Ranking Factors

Google isn’t trying to make this hard for you.  Just like you, they want to provide the best product to their customers, and their customers are search engine users.  To rank high in search results, you need to let Google know that your business is the most relevant and prominent near their search users.

With smaller marketing and advertising budgets than larger competitors, organically ranking high and showing up as a relevant choice when customers are searching for what you are selling can be the main path of growth for a local business.  Knowing the current local SEO ranking factors lets you create an actionable SEO plan that differentiates you from the competition.

 

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Zach_Color_Trans_small_CroppedAbout The Author

Zach Anderson is the co-founder of Reputation Loop (helping small businesses grow by generating customer feedback and online reviews) who loves online marketing and golf.

The post Google Local SEO Ranking Factors for Small Business appeared first on Reputation Loop.

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