Google Places is now Google+ Local (What Changed & What you Need To Do)?

by Josh Nelson on September 22, 2012

A few months ago Google changed their Maps engine from Google Places to Google+ Local. This is an important development for Plumbing & HVAC Contractors because the Google Map is typically the most prominent and viewed section on the search engines when a consumer searches “Your City + Plumber” or “Your City + AC Repair”.

• 97 percent of consumers search for local businesses online
• With 65.9 percent market share, the clear majority of these local searches are done using Google, which is still the undisputed king of web search (Bing has 15.1 percent market share)
• 72 percent of consumers research companies through social channels before making purchases
• 71 percent claim reviews from family members or friends exert a “great deal” or “fair amount” of influence on their purchase decisions

Moreover, Google has clearly decided to place a lot of value on local listings in their search results. What’s more, as Google pushes into mobile, the company will feature local listings through their mobile apps for Android (currently available) and iPhone (in the works), helping nearby customers discover your business.

So, if you take all of these things together, it’s easy to see that Google+ Local is an incredible opportunity to get in front of your target market, right at the moment they’re looking for plumbing or HVAC services. And we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future.

There are a number of great benefits assocated with Google+ Local:

Here’s a quick list:

• Pay nothing (it’s free) – It won’t cost you a penny to list your business on Google. (That said, it will take you some time to set up your page.)
• Get found on Google, increase website traffic – This is probably the most compelling benefit. In the digital age, Google is virtually everyone’s first stop when looking for any kind of information—including local vendors. By increasing your visibility in search, you open your business to an *enormous* and constantly growing audience of people looking for plumbing services online.
• Get found on mobile devices -  Most plumbing & HVAC businesses struggle to maintain a web presence at all, let alone a “responsive” web presence that is fully optimized for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. The fact is, the web is becoming increasingly mobile. Morgan Stanley predicts that mobile web browsing will outpace desktop browsing within just a few years. Businesses ignore this trend at their own peril! By optimizing your Google+ Local page, your business can effectively outsource its mobile marketing to Google, which offers consumers several mobile apps that facilitate local business discovery. These mobile apps help buyers find you!
• Help your business stand out amongst  the competition According to a recent count, only 20 percent of eligible small businesses have claimed their listing on Google+ Local! By claiming your listing you greatly increase your ability to stand out in the Plumbing Space. Why leave this low- hanging fruit for your competitors to snatch up?
• Learn more about your customers – It’s no shocker: Google, a company founded and run by coders, is all about analytics. And thus, their business tools, Google+ Local included, come with excellent tools for mining data and gathering market intelligence you can use to improve your offering, keep customers happy, and collect bigger profits.
• Boost engagement  with images and updates – In the past 10 years, the web has gotten social. Google is no exception. They’ve made it easier for businesses to engage with their customers and build relationships. And here’s the thing: your customers expect you to be active on social networks like Google+. Think I’m just making that up? On the contrary: according to a Cone Business Study:
• 93 percent of customers expect companies to have a presence on social channels
• 85 percent expect companies to interact with them on those social channels
• Pocket bigger profits than the competition

As you can see, Google+ Local is a free resource that helps you get found online, drive more traffic to your website, stand out in a crowded marketplace, acquire insight into your customer base, engage with your customers using a variety of media types, increase sales with promos and special offers, and ultimately, boost your overall profitability.

What you need to do

So, now that you know what is changed; what do you need to do next? Get into your new Google+ Local Business page and start Optimizing it!

Best practices: How to optimize  your listing

OK, now it’s time to get into the fun stuff: How to make the most of your new platform in Google—how to create a local listing that delivers the biggest return for your business.

By taking the time to optimize your listing, you’ll raise the profile of your page and get more prospects to click through, visit your business, and ultimately, call for your plumbing services.

Here are a handful of simple ways you can improve your page and make sure it performs at a high level for your business.

• Pay close attention to your cover and profile  photos – Given that Google has decided to put such a high emphasis on imagery in the Google+ Local layout, it’s not surprising that one of the best ways to boost your page’s power is to include high-quality images that resonate with your audience. So again, the imperative here is to go beyond the bare minimum. Don’t just upload any random old photos you find on your hard drive. Take your time to find great images that reflect the quality of your business, the quality of your team, and the quality of your services. If you need to hire a local photographer, go for it! (Put an ad in Craigslist—you’ll get a ton of responses, particularly if you live near an art school.)  If you’re going to use your company logo as your profile pic (recommended), make sure it’s high enough resolution and the correct size and shape (at least 250px × 250px square) so that it’s not grainy or distorted.
• Write a killer Introduction – Your introduction, which appears on your About tab, is your opportunity to speak directly to your audience, without any filters. So don’t make this an afterthought! Here’s a great example of a descriptive and compelling statement from a Plumber in Philadelphia:
• Serving the Phillidelphia market since 2006, We are committed to providing you with a level of service that is second to none – including a satisfaction guarantee and discounts on many new installations and repairs. By choosing to work with Tim’s Plumbing & Heating, Inc., you are choosing to work with a highly trained and experienced staff, whose attention to detail, commitment to our customers and 100% money back guarantee is surpassed by none.
• Make sure your page is 100 percent complete – So I’ll start with the simplest and most important thing you can do to optimize your Google+ Local page … Fill it out. Seriously. That’s it. Complete ALL text fields—even the ones that aren’t required, particularly: email address, website URL, description, and categories. Here’s a helpful quote from SEOmoz, who know what they’re talking about when it comes to Google: “Think about it like being back in in school and writing a paper; you’ll pass doing the minimum set forth but a little extra effort can go a long way. Don’t fill out some of the extra details, fill them all out; and don’t just add one photo, add several photos.”– SEOmoz The larger point is, don’t just do the bare minimum. Make sure it’s 100 percent complete. In the optimization game, a listing that’s 90 percent complete isn’t an A-. It’s an F!
• Acquire  citations from other directories – For those of you toughing it out in crowded markets, the next best thing you can do to improve the visibility of your listing, vis a vis your competitors, is to acquire citations from other business directories. What’s a citation? It’s a listing of your business on another local directory. Here’s the deal: Google crawls the web for information—citations—about your business from a variety of third-party sources, including Yelp and Yellow Pages. The more citations, or mentions, you have, the more content Google’s spiders have to work with, and the more authority your Google+ Local listing will have. The more authority and credibility that your business has in the eyes of Google, the more likely your listing is to appear on the top of the results. Additionally, it is important to make sure that the information you submit to other directories is consistent. Accuracy across all, or almost all, citation sources helps associate trust with a Google+ Local page. Here’s a list of directories you can get citations from, starting with some of the bigger ones.

•     Yelp

•     Bing

•     Yahoo

•     BizJournals

•     CitySearch

•     Best of the Web

•     Mapquest

•     Merchant Circle

•     Whitepages

•     Supermedia

•     LinkedIn

•     Foursquare

•     Biznik

•     Local.com

•     ThinkLocal

•     CitySlick

•     MyCity

•     Outside.in

•     Dex

• Encourage  customers to write reviews – Here’s a more challenging but very effective way to boost the position of your page: get your customers to write reviews.  That means getting in the habit of asking your customers, particularly when they offer unsolicited positive feedback, to take a few moments to put their experience into words and submit it to Google for the world to see. Another approach is to give people a gift or enter them into a drawing in exchange for their time to submit a review. If you take this route, the important thing to stress is that you’re not asking them for a positive review—because that would be a bribe of sorts. Emphasize that you want them to be honest in their assessment of your company, and that they’ll get rewarded for their honesty! More often than not, people will be happy to write a review. A few, though, will balk because they’re not sure what to say. When this happens, just give them a few prompts, but take care not to put words in their mouth, because their review might come across as a scripted and insincere, which, needless to say, defeats the purpose. Lastly, do not under any circumstances write bogus reviews and submit them under a pseudonym.
• Example (you can use) of how to ask a customer for a Google+ Local review:

 Subject: Quick question for you

Hi {firstname},

Quick question for you. Are you happy with your experience with our company?

If so, would you consider writing a brief review for our Google+ Local page? This will help other people find our company online. (If you’re not 100% pleased with our service, please let us know so we can make things right!)

How to write a review–

1.   Click here to visit our Google+ Local page (INSERT LINK)

2.   Click ‘Write a review’ (blue button). Note: You’ll need to sign in to Google+

3.   Write a review and click Publish

Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate your candid feedback.

{signature}

• Upload a ton of images to your page – The other thing you can and should do is add images. Lots of them. SEO analysts have documented a strong correlation between a page’s ranking and the number of photos and videos it has. So make sure to max out your
• Create offers – Another way to leverage our listing is to include offers. This is a pretty great feature, because it provides the prospect an incentive to call you rather than the competition.
• A few tips:
• Make sure they comply with Google’s offer guidelines
• Be GENEROUS
• Always identify the value the customer is getting

What not to do

OK, now I want to identify some hazards and pitfalls that you should avoid when

using Google+ Local …

• Don’t leave gaps in your page – I may sound like a broken record here, but it’s worth mentioning again. Don’t leave gaps in your page. Fill it out completely! Google itself has revealed that page completeness is one of the most important ranking factors, so it’s vitally important to dot every “I” and cross every “T” when you’re setting up your listing.

• Don’t “set it and forget it” – This shouldn’t come as a surprise: a fresh, regularly updated page will outperform a stale and neglected page. If you want your Google+ Local page to really deliver value to your business, you need to add some value to it on a regular basis. Consider creating a recurring calendar event to remind yourself to log into Google and freshen up your page. This will also give you an opportunity to view your analytics and see how your page is performing.
• Keep your page fresh and accurate
• Monitor customer reviews (use testimonials, respond to critical reviews, etc.)
• Don’t stuff your name, description, and/or categories with keywords Unfortunately, many business have received some really bad advice when it comes to Google+ Local optimization. One of the worst pieces of advice is to stuff your page with keywords. This is dumb for two reasons. First, it tempts the wrath of the Google gods, who consider this a form of spamming. Second, it just makes you look cheesy to your would-be customers.
• By all means, use keywords, but don’t overdo it.
• Do not tempt the Google gods
• Keyword stuffing looks spammy (which makes your business look bad to customers)

How to get started

So, if you haven’t done so already, your first action item is to create your Google+ Local page. However:

• If you already have a Google Places page, you can use that dashboard to control your new Google+ Local page.
• If there is already a Google+ Local page associated with your business, navigate to that page and click the “Manage this page” button (pictured). Follow the steps to verify your connection with the business and become page owner. Verification: request PIN, wait for the postcard or phone call.

If neither of these apply to you, follow these steps to create your Google+ Local page:

• Sign in to Google+ (yes, you must have a Google+ profile to create a Google+ Local page)
• Click the Create a new page button in the upper right.
• Select the Local Business or Place category.
• Type in your business’s phone number and click Locate. Make sure that the phone number you use is a business line and not a personal or cell phone number.
• If you see your business listed, click on your business’s name.CYou’ll be able to edit the address later if anything is incorrect. If the name of your business doesn’t appear, click Add your business to Google or Look up a different number to try again.
• Enter or edit basic information about your business, including business name, phone number, and address. If Google already has information about your business, you’ll be asked to confirm it. You can also edit any information that’s incorrect.
• Add categories to your local page to help users better understand what your business does. In the Category box, select the main category that best describes your business.
•  Select an age requirement that’s appropriate for your business.
• Click Create, and you’re done! Now you can visit your page and add even more details about your business, like hours, your website, and more contact information.

If you follow these steps you will be i a great position to capitalize on the opportunities built into the New Google+ Local. For more ideas tips and strategies please download our FREE Internet Marketing & SEO Guide for Plumbing Contractors by clicking here.

Last updated by Josh Nelson at September 22, 2012.

Tagged as: Google + Local, Google + What changed, Plumber SEO

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