Maybe you’ve just launched your new website (congratulations!). Maybe you’ve been struggling with SEO for a while. Either way, there’s one 5 minute trick that will boost your SEO. A couple of clients call us a week later saying, “whatever you did, my phone just started ringing.”
Here’s what to do: set up a Google My Business page. As everyone shifts towards mobile, associating a location with your business is one of the best ways to have an impact on the rankings. Formerly known as Google Places, this is the feature that updates your listing in Google Maps.
From what we see, the more content you have on your My Business listing – especially how current it is and how many reviews you have – the more phone calls start coming in to you. To get started, go to Google My Business and claim your business. You’ll have to verify the address, but you won’t necessarily have to display the exact address for customers.
Give it a try, and let us know how it goes!
As promised, here are a few other tricks for small businesses:
- Get those reviews! It doesn’t matter where the reviews are listed – Facebook, Google, Yelp – but you should have them. The more of these, the more chance that page will rank. Bonus points if “that page” is your own website.
- Webmaster Tools, just google it. By submitting your sitemap, which some website platforms automatically generate, you basically tell that search engine that you want to be crawled, pretty please. Both Google and Bing offer a tool like this.
- Get a blog. I know blogging is hard, but try a few different systems and find a way to make it work for you. The more often you write, the more current your site will be, and the more organic value you’ll generate.
- Do you have a bunch of social profiles? Excellent! Put them to work. At a minimum, they should link back to your website, and ideally these pages have a strong content & engagement strategy behind them.
Is all of this a bit over your head? No problem – give us a call, and we’ll not only check the items off the list above, but we’ll also update a few important things directly on your website.
