Google Places in 2015: Local Listings Optimization
Ensuring a strong presence on sites like Yelp and Google Maps in 2015 may be just as important for your business as any on-page optimization strategies. Though most SEO strategies are heavily focused on optimizing your business’s website, you’re likely missing out on valuable opportunities if you ignore investment in local directories, Google Maps, and review sites as well.
Google Places in 2015: Local Listings Optimization
Ensuring a strong presence on sites like Yelp and Google Maps in 2015 may be just as important for your business as any on-page optimization strategies. Though most SEO strategies are heavily focused on optimizing your business’s website, you’re likely missing out on valuable opportunities if you ignore investment in local directories, Google Maps, and review sites as well.
Google Places in 2015: Local Listings Optimization
Ensuring a strong presence on sites like Yelp and Google Maps in 2015 may be just as important for your business as any on-page optimization strategies. Though most SEO strategies are heavily focused on optimizing your business’s website, you’re likely missing out on valuable opportunities if you ignore investment in local directories, Google Maps, and review sites as well.
Google estimates that 20% of all its visits are local in nature. In response, they have launched Google Places to aid people in their searches. Google Places is an online listing tool that allows businesses to add their own information (address, phone number, hours of operation etc). It has been rapidly growing, and many businesses have already taken advantage of its convenience and marketing power.
In many ways, Google placing is replacing, if it hasn’t already, paper phone directories and has become the place to go for finding company contact information like phone numbers and addresses. If optimized and managed properly, your listing on Google Places can bring your business many benefits. By working on the listings criteria, reviews and references it grows in importance in its respective category and can be one of the top listings thus showing on the first page of Google’s search results.
Google has tied the dominance of the listing to both your website’s organic presence, quality of reviews available online and a number of other criteria.