Category: Google

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A Guide to Placing Locally – One City with Multiple Locations

Local Coffee Shop
Local Coffee Shop

In this series of blog posts on placing for local searches on Google, I’ll take a look at a few strategies that work especially where you operate in one city with multiple locations. Over this week and next, I’ll be looking at other tougher to place scenarios and offering some advice on what to do as well.

The easiest scenario and the first I’ll focus on is where your multiple location business is all based on one city.

Here’s what I’ve found works well for placement for this scenario:

1. Make sure to put your locations with complete address and phone number in the footer of your website. If you have more than three locations this starts to be a little bit cumbersome, but for most businesses your two or three locations can easily be entered in the footer of all pages of your website.

2. Make sure to create a locations page in your website where you’ll list all your locations with full physical addresses, spelled out state name versus abbreviation, zip code and phone number. Link these locations to specially designed pages that show pictures of each location and give a little bit of flavor about what each location offers that may be unique. You may want to include cross streets, specialties, metro directions, and a blurb about the staff. It is crucial that you do not use cookie cutter content for each location simply change the location specifics. Make sure each page is unique and validates as unique using Copyscape Premium (my data checking tool of choice).

3. Set up a Google+ Local page for each location. Understand that there is no scamming Google on addresses. You’ve really got to have a business at the location you register. Google will send to that address a PIN number inside an envelope with no Google branding on it that looks like regular junk mail. It is important that you and your staff really watch for a week for this confirmation letter in order to complete the validation of your Google+ Local page.

The power of placing locally on Google for your individual locations is huge. The reach, potential visibility, and customer traffic you can get from following these very simple steps is not to be discounted. Google is preferring to promote local businesses first in the organic search results so it is very important to capitalize on this to boost your business’ exposure.

 

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Improving Your Rank in Google’s Local Listings

Man's hand pointing on street map
No Kidding Google Knows Your Business Location!

Local listings on Google.com can make or break certain types of businesses, but did you know that when you drop in placement there may be some things you can do to remediate your drop.

Here’s what I recommend you look at first after your ranking has dropped:

1. Make sure you review, understand and fully embrace Google’s Places Quality Guidelines.

2. You must link to a specific address – no post office boxes.

3. Google wants a local phone number not your vanity number or a 1-800 number.

4. Select one category at the minimum from Google’s own list of categories. Even if you provide permanent makeup not tattoos, the correct category for you according to Google is tattoos. Provide other choices using the custom category option.

5. Here’s a big one: “Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.” So if you don’t ever meet your customer face to face, you will not be able to get Google+ Local placement and should not expect to rise in the rankings or placement.

6. Be aware that Google is cracking down right now on duplicate listings for Google+ Local Places; trying to weed out fictitious accounts or those that have previously gamed the system trying to get better location specific placement by using fake or bogus addresses. You can no longer use your mother-in-laws address as a store location just to get placement in that city.

With Google Local providing an excellent avenue to drive traffic to local stores, but with Google’s improved understanding of your real business location, it is getting nearly impossible to “game” the system as many were previously able to do.

 

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Google Shopping Custom Labels Explained

If you are currently running Product Listing Ads (PLA) in AdWords, be aware that there is a new campaign type that is more powerful and allows you greater control available in your AdWords control panel called Google Shopping.

PLA programs won’t be rolled over automatically, so I recommend that you create a new Google Shopping campaign and then pause your old PLA program. However before you do that, you’ll want to update your Google Merchant data feed with a new column called custom labels.

At first I though that in the custom label field you could simply add your descriptor, but this is not how it works. So, here’s my recommendation.

1. You can have five custom labels. Decide how you want to sort your products as you will be able to bid on them separately with this approach. For example in your data feed you may call all bucket pallet fork products custom label 0, all manure fork products custom label 1, and all high profit items custom label 2 and so on.

2. Set up your Google Shopping campaign. In the new Product Groups tab, select the plus next to all “all products” to create sub categories and then select your custom label number. Then bid separately based on your needs for each of your custom labels.

3. This action gives you far greater control over what is shown in Google Shopping ads and greater control over your return on investment.

Here’s a great video from Google that helps clarify just what Google Shopping is and more screen shots on custom labels.

 

You can also watch the video here http://youtu.be/ivsyPeYeyqs

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The Clarity of What You Write Matters a Lot

Matt Cutts has some great words of wisdom for bloggers and website owners in this video on how technical you should get in content and blog posts. You can watch the video at YouTube.

In a nutshell, here are the takeaways on this important topic.

1. Clarity of what you write for your website or blog really matters to Google as it will determine relevancy and what queries your content will match in the Google index.

2. If you cannot make the content easy for people to understand then you do not really understand the content yourself. Matt says this not me! This does not mean that you need to “dumb down” what you write, but content should be informative and written in a manner that attracts those that may not have the depth of experience on a topic to your site to learn more.

3. There will always be a special place for higher level content on a topic but as far as Google is concerned the broader the appeal the better your placement will be.

4. When you make your content too technical or statistical heavy you lose the understandability of your content unless your audience is particularly coming to you for higher level information. Matt Cutts says err on the side of clarity and I say, write for the high school graduate in the bulk of your writing.