If the nature of business is a physical place where your customers/clients need to come visit you in person to do business with you, you need to promote your business in a way that you encourage more people to walk in to your place of business. Now, this can be a challenge to some businesses in today’s fast-paced technology driven world, considering that we have so many modes of doing business and transacting online.

There are many ways to promote your business online using digital marketing platforms, but if your business is local, you want to focus your marketing and promotion activities to only a particular location or set of locations in your city. This is known as Local Search Optimization. One effective way of doing this is to list your business on Google using Google My Business Listing.

Listed below is a quick step-by-step of how you can do so:

1. Go to Google My Business
2. Use your existing Gmail address to sign in (if you don’t have a Gmail address, you will need to create one)
3. Click on ‘Add Location’ and follow the steps mentioned on the page
4. Type in the name of your business, if your business’ location shows up in a drop-down list, you can select it, if not, continue typing in the full name of your business and click next and follow the steps mentioned on the page and fill out all the information requested for.
5. Once you are done filling in all the requested information, click on your Google Business Listing and click on ‘info’ located on the left side and ensure you have all the information filled out correctly.

Now in order to increase visibility and improve your online presence on Google for your newly created business listing, you need to optimize it so as to show up in Google search results when people search for businesses/products/services in the same industry or niche as yours. This is a part of local search optimization.

Below is a checklist of what you need to optimize for your Google My Business Listing:

• Allow Google to publicly display your company/business information
• Ensure you select a primary and secondary business category
• Your business address should be correct, accurate and easy for customers to find it
• Your Google business listing’s profile picture should be your company/business logo
• Write a brief description about your business. Ensure to use keywords within your business description.
• Choose the service areas
• Ensure that your business operational days and timings are listed
• List all contact information – phone number, email, website
• Upload as much visual content of your business as possible (images/videos of your products/services, place of business, team, etc)
• Most importantly ensure that you verify your Google Business Listing. It will only show to the public once it is verified.
• Update your Google business listing on a frequent basis using the posts section to keep people informed and updated on new things about your business.
• Ensure you ask your customers/clients to add a review for your business. The more reviews, the better are chances of your business showing up in search results and positive reviews always add assurance and credibility to your business.

Below is an infographic with more details on optimizing your Google business listing.

Source

Google My Business Listing is a very powerful digital marketing tool/platform and is a must for all businesses, especially local businesses.

To further optimize and improve your business’s online presence on Google, you should list your business on local business directory websites. The more the business listings you have across the internet, the better are your chances of ranking in Google search results and driving customers/clients to your place of business.

I have put together a list of tried and tested local business listing websites. Click here to view this list.