Optimise your Google Places listing

Google Places Optimisation

An image showing how the Places/Maps listings are shown in the Google search results for a localised search

So what is your Google Places listing? You might know it as the map results that come up whenever you search for a product or service. Regardless of whether you have signed up for the service chances are your company will have a Google Places listing already, just waiting for you to claim the listing and optimise it.

So why should you be bothered about Google Places optimisation? Recently Google have really been pushing the Places platform and they are giving more and more emphasis to Places listings in the search results, pushing the organic listings further down the page. If you are not up there you will be missing out on the opportunity to get your business in front of many of your potential customers.

You will need a Google account to complete your business listing, if you haven’t got one sign up for one here – www.google.com/accounts

Claiming Your Business Listing

The first thing you need to do to get on the Google Places ladder is claim your business listing. If you have been in business for any length of time and your address details are available over the web then chances are Google has already created a business listing for you, you may even have customer reviews on there that you never even knew about!

Go to maps.google.co.uk and in the search field search for “company name” + city, using the quotation marks around your company name. For example if I was search for a company called ABC Plumbing who operated out of Redcar I would search for “ABC Plumbing” + Redcar.  If you do not see your company it would be wise to try a couple of variations to the search terms just to be sure that there is no listing, we want to avoid making a duplicate listing if at all possible because this will cause problems later on down the line.

An example unclaimed business listing

If, after searching, you do not find a Places page associated with your company then you can skip the rest of this section and go to the “Adding a new listing to Google Places” section of this article. If you found a listing associated with your company your next step is to register the Places page to your business. Once you have clicked the link to open the Places page you should see a link in the top right hand corner that says “Edit this place – Business owner?”. If instead it says “Edit this place – Owner-verified listing” then the listing has already been claimed, speak to people within the business to see if anybody has claimed the listing on the businesses behalf. If they haven’t and you have no idea who has claimed the listing you will need to report the problem to Google. Under the business name and address there will be a link that says “more” click that and then click “Report a Problem”.

Your next step is to click the “Business Owner?” link, this will take you to a page asking if you want to “Add, Edit or Suspend a listing”. Check the “Edit my business information” option and click continue. This will take you to the area where you can edit the company information.

Adding a new listing to Google Places

If you need to add a new business you need to head over to www.google.com/places and click the “Get Started” link on the right hand side. This should then get you through to the Places dashboard where you can begin inputting details about your business.

Filling out your business listing

An example of a better Google Places listing, The owner has claimed the listing, added some photos and attracted reviews from customers.

When filling out your business listing you want to give as much information as you possibly can, in fact ideally we want the Places page to be 100% complete. The reason behind this is relevancy, you need to make your business listing as relevant as possible to your keywords. Google is the number one search engine in the UK, in no small part because people trust that when they search for something they will be presented with relevant search results, if they weren’t they would quickly start looking for an alternative search engine. For this reason you have to make your website and Places page as relevant as possible to the terms you want to rank for, to do this we need to completely fill out the business listing with relevant information.

Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts for filling out your business listing:

• Do – Use your exact business name as your company/organisation name on your listing.
• Do Not – Stuff your business name with keywords or locations. It is against Google’s Terms of Service and will get your listing pulled sooner or later.

• Do – Create custom categories pertinent to your business in addition to the one provided.
• Do Not – Stuff the custom categories full of keywords and locations. For instance “plumber Liverpool” is not an acceptable category and breaches Google’s guidelines.

• Do – Provide a local phone number as the main number, complete with area code.
• Do Not – Use a mobile number or 0800 number as your primary business number. You can add these numbers into your business description.

• Do – Write a compelling business description using your primary keywords within the copy.
• Do Not – Go overboard and fill the description box with keywords, making the content of the description box difficult to read. You should not just copy and paste something from your website either, take the time to write a unique description of your company and services.

• Do – Upload as many images as you can. At time of writing Google allowed you to upload 10 images to your profile, make sure you upload 10 images. They can be your company logo, photos of employees, your place of business, company vehicles or photos of past work.

• Do – Upload at least 1 video. If you don’t have one make one, or get one made. It doesn’t have to be Spielberg quality!

There are a number of other things you can do to optimise your Places listing both from within the listing itself and on other websites but this list should give you a good starting point.

Once you are happy with the way you have filled out your listing, hit the submit button. You will then need to verify your listing, to make sure you are allowed to make changes. Unfortunately for UK businesses this means waiting a few weeks for Google to send you a postcard/letter with a PIN number. When that arrives, simply login to you Places account and put the PIN in to activate the listing.

Improving your ranking in Google Places

Make sure you complete your Google Places listing

This one should really go without saying and it is mentioned earlier in the article above so go back and read the rest of the article if you skipped to this section. You need to make sure that you fill in the business listing completely, upload photos and videos, put in as many categories as you can, write a quality description of your company and services etc. This is an important factor and you should take the time to make sure everything is done as well as it can be.

Build citations on external sites

Firstly you need to know what citations are. Citations are references to your business on external websites, we are looking to see the business name, address, contact numbers and if possible email addresses and website. Citations can come from places like business directories (think along the lines of Yell or Thomson Local), industry specific directories, local publications (sometimes your local newspaper website will have local business listings), social websites and so on.

It is extremely important when building citations to be consistent, particularly when it comes to your NAP (Name, address and phone number). You must make sure that you use the same company name, address and phone number across all of the citations that you get. So for example if your company is ABC Plumbing & Heating make sure you use that, exactly as it is written, as your company name in external sites. Using variations like ABC Plumbing, ABC Heating, ABC Plumbers is not going to help your cause, the same goes for your address (if your located at 1 Main Street, make sure you don’t start mixing it up with 1 Main St on some sites). Keep it consistent!

This should go without saying but make sure your address is on your website (even if you are a plumber and you don’t actually sell from that address, we are trying to rank in local search results), having it on every page is even better (in the footer for example).

A bonus tip, if you are struggling to find places to get citations look at the companies who are listing well in the Places rankings and find out where they are listed and get your business listed there too.

Customer Reviews

Getting customer reviews direct to your Places page and other 3rd party websites is another important ranking factor, though not the be all and end all since it can be very easily manipulated. My advice to you is get real reviews from real customers, there will be the temptation to start registering accounts and leaving positive reviews under false names for your business, don’t do this it looks fake and sooner or later you will come unstuck. For example, in researching for this article, I came upon a Places listing for a plumbing company in London. They had 3 reviews on their Places page, all 3 gave a 5 star review, all 3 had only 1 review in their Google history, all 3 left the review on the exact same date and most tellingly all 3 had the exact same writing style (they capitalised the first letter of every word)! It was plain to see, even from a quick glance that the same person had left all 3 reviews. Now not only will this sooner or later get picked up by Google (a few complaints from rival companies will see to that), but any potential customer looking at that page is going to see right through it and instantly form a level of distrust for this company. Do good work, provide a good service and customers will be more than happy to leave a review if you ask.

Optimise your own website

This is really an article of it’s own so I won’t go into too much depth here but as well as optimising your Google Places page your need to optimise your own website for local search. Make sure your address is on every page and make sure it is consistent with the address you have used on your places page. Make sure your location is included in the Title, content and headings on your website. Build links to your site using your city name in the anchor text.

A well optimised website goes hand in hand with a well optimised Google Places listing.