Google My Business!

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From the course by University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

505 ratings

University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

505 ratings

Course 3 of 6 in the Specialization Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Learn the ins and outs of optimizing a website, from conducting an initial audit to presenting your findings and recommendations. Hands-on activities include learning how to select and apply appropriate keywords throughout a website, incorporating keyword research in a content marketing strategy, and optimizing a site for local search. You will also learn strategies for setting goals and client/stakeholder expectations, building effective analytics and reports, and communicating SEO improvements.

From the lesson

Local SEO

Welcome to week 3! In the lessons that follow, you will take a close look at local SEO strategy. You will see how to optimize your Google business pages, on-site content and external references such as citations, backlinks, and reviews to help your local business have higher visibility in the local search landscape. By the end of this module, you should be able to not only describe a bit of the history of how Google displays local searches but also utilize best practices to develop a high quality local SEO approach.

Why's Local SEO Important?2:02

Local SEO History3:58

Current Local SEO Landscape3:38

Organic Search Versus Paid Advertising5:05

Google My Business!8:57

Improving Your Local Visibility10:17

Importance of Off-site Citations4:54

Quality Off-site Link Building8:07

Importance of Customer Reviews7:09

Meet the Instructors

Rebekah May
SEO Manager & Lead SEO Instructor, Lead Qual
UC Davis Division of Continuing and Professional Education

Hello again.

Now that you have a better understanding of the local search landscape.

And how Google may incorporate paid features into organic results.

Let's move on to how you can get more visibility online through opening and

optimizing a Google business page.

In this lesson,

we'll talk about why it's important to set up a Google business page and

key into some of the best practices for optimizing and legitimizing your business.

Google provides business owners with a free page to advertise their business.

This is part of the Google+ platform.

To help ensure Google is aware of your business, your address, and

to provide customers with the place to leave reviews,

you will want to setup a Google My Business page.

Google frequently changes the names of products and in the past,

this was also known as Google Plus Business Pages and Google Place Pages.

The process is free, pretty easy, and self-explanatory.

You will simply need to go to google.com/business to sign up.

Because the process is self-explanatory,

I will not walk you through the entire set up process.

But, before you sign up,

you will need to have a personal Google account that this can be tied to.

When you first set up your business, you will be asked to verify

that your business exists through a couple of different methods.

Many times when you are working with a client, they have not yet

gone thru the verification process.

This is an important first step, as some areas of your page

will not be available to you until your business has been verified.

This can be done thru a phone call to your business or through a postcard,

but the postcard process is more time consuming so

I recommend using the automated phone method where possible.

You may have to coordinate this with your client as Google will need to call their

business number and you may be working from another office.

While the setup is straight forward, I'd like to walk you through the important

areas of the Google My Business Page to optimize.

The more complete, active, and visited your pages,

the better chance your business has, of appearing in the three pack.

Now that Google+ pages have been somewhat disconnected from local search,

as we discussed earlier, the future of how your Google business page

relates to your rankings, and the three pack is unseen.

However, I believe that having an optimized page is still important

as this helps prove to Google that you are a legitimate business.

Reviews are also important to being discovered,

as well as increasing your appeal to future customers.

Having a completed page that is active and

visually impressive will increase reviews and foot traffic to your local business.

You can also review Google's My Business Guidelines

at the link provided in your study materials.

An important part of Google's local trust algorithm is its trust factor.

The higher level of trust Google can assign to your site,

the more opportunity your site has to rank.

Or, your business has of appearing in the three pack.

Because of this,

there are a lot of small ways to prove the legitimacy of your business.

And these should be taken into account throughout the optimization process.

One thing I want to mention early on is consistency.

Part of what increases trust in your business

is consistency of information about your business found through the web.

So it's important to make sure that your Google My Business name

is exactly the same as how your business name appears elsewhere.

This even includes small changes.

For example, if your business is Joe's Pizza and Brewery, but

elsewhere your name is referenced as Joe's Pizza and

Pub, Google will read these as two different entities.

Always spell and write your business name the same way,

your phone number the same way, and, your address the same way.

To ensure you are consistent in your efforts,

keep these best practices in mind.

If you have a suite, always use your suite number on the second line of your address.

This way navigation systems or mapping systems can not get confused

about the address of your business, and your location will always look the same.

In some cases, you are only given one line and

your Google business page will display the address on one line.

But when given the option, enter it correctly each time.

For phone numbers, it's important to prove that you are a local business.

Avoid 800 numbers and use your area code.

Always try to get an area code in the city you are doing business and

trying to bring in.

The second thing to check is the email address.

A lot of businesses will use a Gmail account for ease of use but

it is recommended to use an email address tied to the domain of the site.

For example, instead of ucdavis@gmail.com,

you should use admin@ucdavis.edu as this lends more legitimacy to your business.

The category or categories you choose for your business are very important

to letting Google know what queries best relate to your services.

You can choose multiple categories for your business page.

But make sure they accurately describe your business.

Your primary category should be the category most relevant to your business.

If you are not sure what the main category is, you can look up subcategories

in a tool like Moz Local and see the main category it belongs to.

I included a link to this tool in your study materials.

The next step is making sure you have an optimized tagline and

introduction for your business.

The text within the tagline will appear as the meta description

if your page shows up in google results.

It's a good idea to put any information you want users to know right away

at the very front of your tagline.

The introduction is used as brief description about your business.

This can include keywords but

should sound natural and not as if it was written for SEO.

This can also include links to pages on your website.

So if you want to call out certain pages that customers maybe interested in,

this is a good place to do so.

The next thing you want to do is make sure you have identified logos and

images uploaded to your page.

When your logo or image appears in the local search results,

you want clients to immediately identify that image as you.

This will help increase click through to your site.

Your other header image can be any eye catching image you desire.

You will also notice a checkmark next to the URL in the profile photo field.

This means that an outside website has been linked to the page and

verified by adding this to a verified account in Google Webmaster Tools.

This is another great step,

as it really helps cement the legitimacy of your business and website.

Doing so will also help you get a vanity URL.

So instead of a string of numbers, UC Davis has +ucdavis in the URL.

Now that you are aware of some important aspects of the Google My Business page,

let's discuss what you can do on your own site, and outside of your site,

to help influence your site's position in search engines.

That completes the video portion of this lesson.

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