How to Use Google My Business to Get More Customers
Getting the customer in your neighborhood to drive to shop when they need your product or service wasn’t usually easy. You either have to erect enormous billboards that they will see on the driveway or you keep a bunny outside that tries to convince people. All these strategies have high overhead costs but yield brief returns. So, ensure you opt for something that saves you time, money, and makes you the best option to your prospective customer. Setting up a Google My Business framework would do the job for you easily and speedily. With Google My Business, you can list your business, display your value offerings, and the solutions you offer as well. This way, people easily locate you by clicking a button that draws them to your business. Listing your business on google is absolutely free, however, let’s give you more reasons to help you start the process immediately. Why you need a Google My Business Account? A Google my business account is important for every business functioning in our digital world today. The benefits are enormous, however, I will focus on a few important ones. Some of these benefits include: Increased Visibility Everyone searches for anything online first. Today’s digital world has made the online search so easy and efficient. And if anyone is looking for a place to patronize or for a certain product, they will check the product or the store online before proceeding. When your business is listed using Google my business, you can easily draw everyone looking to purchase a product or get a service in the line of your business. With your profile fully optimized, they can easily access a lot about you and that can easily draw them. Although you might have a top website, this listing will help you show up at the forefront of customers within your community and it’s one sweet local SEO strategy. Increased Customer Confidence Customers build confidence in a product or a service when they’ve heard or read about what people who have experienced that product or service think. And a lot of business people don’t pay serious attention to this arm of the business. Reviews work. Reviews help strengthen the purchase decision of any lead. A good review is a booster for the customer’s confidence, and a critical review can just harm their faith. Therefore, building trust on the web is important and a good listing can help you. A lot of people trust online reviews a lot. In fact, a study shows 88% of people trust an online review from their friends and even strangers. So, if you want to strengthen your customer confidence, you need to list your business online. Updates If you run a business that demands individuals to come to your store, then listing your business online just became extra necessary for you. It’s quite important, especially when you have serious competition next door and you want to stay in business. A great business listing will keep your customers and leads aware of all the updates happening in your business. Although your website can effectively execute this, many people won’t want to visit your webpage. Instead, they’ll only search for your business name on Google and take what they see. So, listing your business on Google will help your customers stay on track with happenings in the business and this will help them trust you more. How To Structure Your Google My Business Even if you can see your business name on a Google listing, you must ensure other aspects of your Google my business account are in check. There are about five steps to start and complete the listing process and they include: Sign in This is where you have to search http://www.google.com/business and you sign in with your professional business email, and other necessary contact information. Add your business After you have signed in, you click on the “Add my Business” option. After adding your business name, you choose a category wherein most of your offers sit in. Immediately that process is complete, you head over to the next step. Input Your Location Your location is another important aspect of your listing. You have to input your location so people can easily find you when they want. Add contact information Your contact information is another primary aspect of your business. You have to upload the contact information of your business so interested individuals can call you. Complete the Process Completing the process involves agreeing to their terms and conditions. More so, you can allow the notifications option so you can be notified when an interested person sends a message. Verifying your Business on Google Verifying your business is another important and often overlooked aspect of your listing. A lot of times, a verification process demands you use a postcard. And this process is important as it helps Google and people know you’re a human entity and a viable business. In verifying your business, you need to sign-in to your business account. After signing into this account, you have to click the business account you want to verify (this is important when you have multiple businesses). There are different ways through which you can verify a business. However, using either your phone or mail remains the best option when you want to verify your business. Further Reading: 15 Reasons Why Marketing Through Social Media is a Must For Every Small Business Claiming & Editing Your Business On Google If you’ve listed your business on Google, you need to ensure you claim it. When you don’t claim your business listing, you can’t secure it from hackers. Claiming your business is really easy. First, you need to sign into your Google my Business account. Second, you have to click the button with an inscription “Own this business?” After you’ve clicked that button, you’ll get a form to fill that will enable you to own the listing. Making changes in your business listing profile is important to keep your customers updated at
What is SEO and How It Works for Small Businesses in 2021
As a small business, building your visibility online is important if you want a bigger share of the market. And if you think I’m simply talking about marketing through social media, then you will be incorrect as growing your business online goes beyond that. To effectively grow your business online, you must be visible to the search engines. Essentially, your business blog must show up for keywords related to its niche. And to make this possibility accessible to you, you basically need to understand what is SEO and how it can help your business grow. Clutch confirms the number of small businesses that create high-quality content for SEO increased 16% from 2018. In 2020, a larger number of businesspeople have realized the value of SEO and content marketing to their business, and have made an enormous investment into it. So, why would your case be any different? In this article, I will give you a basic understanding of what is SEO. Furthermore, I will take you through different aspects of these conversations, showing you how a search engine functions and how you can optimize your blog and content to fit the SEO rule. What is SEO & How Does It Work? SEO is an acronym that represents Search Engine Optimization. While this may sound strange to many internet users, it should something that you should be very familiar with when you want to do business online. Running an online business without SEO will cost you more money. Search engines have a duty to offer every searcher results relevant to their search. And to effectively execute this responsibility, they must ensure they have pages that communicate the best answers to every query indexed and ready to produce as a result page. However, before they can introduce the search engine results of these pages, the search engine robots crawl the pages of these platforms to ensure they have accurate information that’s worthy of showing up on a result page. Furthermore, they run test to ensure the content is optimized for the keyword in question. Search Engine Optimization is the process whereby you streamline any content to be a brilliant answer to a particular query or set of queries that searchers will input on the search engines. When your contents have SEO optimization, it helps set your brand as an authority in its niche. What Are the Unique Aspects of Search Engine Optimization? Search optimization has two unique aspects, however, content marketing is an important aspect people often overlook. So, in this section, we will take a closer look at these aspects of search engine optimization and how they can affect the online presence of your business. On Page Optimization If you want your content to rank online, then on-page optimization is necessary. When you get the optimization right on-page, you make it easy for the search engine robots to crawl your site, increase your site performance, and a lot of other things on the front end. On-page optimization works in certain sections of your website that include: Internal Linking Internal links help people spend more time on your site, and you know dwell time can boost your rankings. With proper internal linking, you can build your SEO and reduce your bounce rate. When doing your internal linking, ensure you link to anchor text – avoid linking to a text that has only one word. Furthermore, find out articles that have great relevance to the content you’re writing when you want to do your internal linking. Title Tag The title tag is another important aspect of search engine optimization that a lot of bloggers overlook. If your title tag is messed up, you mess your SEO up. Title tag helps search engines and users know the relevance of a page and the quality of conversations that will transpire within. When you optimize your title tags, you help search engines rank your content better. Meta Description A meta description is a little section of text, not over 150 characters, that explains basic information about a content. A good meta description highlights or summarizes the content by highlighting the most important things about that content. Quality meta descriptions capture the keyword of any article, and even if you cannot write a meta description, the search engines will create one automatically for your blog. Image and Alt Tags Images are a very important aspect of SEO. While a lot of bloggers use images, a good number of them never use alt tags on the images. Alt tags are a very important aspect of on-page optimization. A good alt tag will reflect the focus keyword of your content sop search engines can rank it alongside the query. Sub Headings Writing content is not usually a problem; structuring content stands as the basic problem. This problem of content structure has made a lot of content fail to get visible on the internet as search engines can’t crawl and index them. Subheadings are the nuts that screw poorly structured content together. With the tight subheadings, the search engines can give priority and crawl the posts better. Note: When you want a content to rank and do well on the internet, optimizing for one or two keywords is important. Additionally, submitting your site map to the search engines makes it easier for them to crawl your content and scan your pages with ease. Off Page Optimization When you’ve done your on-page optimization, you’ve only completed one aspect of the job. Off-page optimization doesn’t focus on what happens within your content or blog space, but what happens outside it that can help you build trust and become visible to search engines. Off-page optimization falls under three aspects which include: Backlink According to Moz, Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. In essence, back links to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. Search engines believe sites should complement and not compete. So, to boost the