Blog Of A Boston Web Designer.

Here is a technique to easily get your business listed online and rank first or at the top of Google’s search engine. This is a simple trick that will take about 10 minutes and can considerably increase the visibility of your business in the online world.

Requirements:
• Address or Phone Number to confirm listing
• Website is not necessary

Walk-thru:
There are 6 sections to fill-out to create your local business listing. You do not have to fill each section but it is in your best interest to do so. Completing your profile 100% will improve your ranking and provide more opportunities for you to insert keywords related to your business, its services or products.

These 6 sections include:
• Basic Information (company name, address, number, email, website, description and categories)
• Hours of Operation
• Payment Options
• Photos
• Videos
• Additional Details (parking, brands carried, other information you would like to include)

Example:
This is what your listing will look like when someone searches for a service or product. Google will automatically adjust the results for the map to fit the searchers geographical location. These local business results get pushed above the traditional search engine results in Google which makes getting listed valuable to any company.

How To Improve Your Listing:
It is possible to achieve good results by quickly listing your business but it is also possible to achieve even greater success with a few easy tweaks. The first way to improve visibility is to insert keywords into your company name, description and the other available areas to broaden your reach in search engines. Keyword research is important if you want to gain the most from your listing or website. If you use Google Analytics for your website then you can see what terms people use to find your company and see what they don’t use. There are also sites that can tell you how many times a certain keyword is searched to see if it is a high-traffic or low-traffic keyword.

The second way to push your listing up the ranks is to have customers or clients write a review for your company. Your client or customer will need to have a Google account to write a review but with Google dominating the internet you should have no problem finding a few to help you out. Reviews have a strong influence on where your listing will appear. So if you find your business being lost in the many pages of other businesses get some reviews and you will notice you will move up quickly.

What’s good about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that you can (and will need to) constantly tweak and build upon it to improve your rank. Search engines are constantly evolving their algorithms for results so it’s important to monitor how your website or business ranks to make sure your competition doesn’t pass you. There are a few applications that can monitor your sites rankings; you can also use Google Analytics and Local Business Center to view your stats.

Results:
Within one week of listing my business in Google’s Local Business Center I was placed within the top 10 of out of 389,608 local results for the term “Boston Web Design”. This was done by completing my profile 100%, optimized for the keywords I hand selected and with 5 reviews. You can see from the chart below that for the month of August I got over 2700 impressions (an impression is every time your business is shown) and 34 clicks to my website that I would have never gotten before my listing. You can view my local business listing here.

Get started today and create your business listing.