Today I’m writing to show you how to do a search online for a local veterinarian in Naples FL as an example about local business online search marketing and how Google Places is the best friend to a local business owner who wants to get more customers. First of all there have been some recent changes from Google on how they show their search findings and information about local businesses.
For instance, if someone living in my hometown of Naples Florida was looking for a veterinarian, they would type the word veterinarian in the Google search bar. What might show up for the search would be information about veterinarians on government sites and Wikipedia. So if someone was not interested in this particular information, they might add a city and state to the search request behind veterinarian – for example – Naples Florida. Now Google will give search results showing the veterinarians in the town designated – Naples Florida.
You can check this out by typing in veterinarian Naples Florida to see for yourself. You can also use your hometown to find other local businesses that you may want to do business with.
When you look at the search results shown on Google you find Google AdWords ads (otherwise known as pay-per-click ads) at the top of the page and the right side of the page normally. Next, beneath these top ads Google shows customarily up to seven Google Places listings for local veterinarians. And below these Google Places listings, Google shows the organic website listings of local veterinarians.
It appears that Google is giving the most attention and reward to those business owners who have Google Places listings since these are the listings that tend to stand out the most on the Google search page. Google also has a corresponding colorful map with the business site markers to match the Google Places page markers – usually noted as A through G.
Generally, in a fairly competitive market, the business that has the top Google Places page marker which is “A” gets a majority of the clicks from the visitor on the page.
And of course the other areas, such as the Google ads and the organic websites, get less. So to get more traffic and customers to your business, it’s important to be listed on the Google Places A through G area on the Google local search page. Naturally the closer your business ranks to the top of this area…the better.
A Google Places page is just another page on the Internet where people can find out about the local business. When you look at these Google Places pages, it looks like a brochure made about the business. Your company name, address, phone number, and website are listed along with the brief description about the company. You will sometimes see photos and videos about the company. And you will see reviews that others have written about how well, or how not so well, they like the business establishment in their experience of doing business with this particular company.
Completing the local business information required for this Google Places page is known as optimizing a Places page. It takes some work and some knowledge about how to do it correctly so that Google gives you the most credit and reward for completing the information to Google’s specifications.
The average business owner can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do this correctly. However, most local business owners are hiring someone else that is a professional who knows how to correctly complete these Google Places listings for their business.
These business owners know that their time is valuable and they would rather pay someone else to have it done correctly. This way they can get on with running their business and not have to be concerned about this phase of their online marketing.
In my opinion the correct completion of a Google Places page for a business is the very first step to local business online marketing, along with a website – of course.
Google is not currently charging for the local business Places listings. However this does not mean that they will not do so in the future. Originally when Google came up with the concept of Google AdWords, my understanding is that they did not charge for these ads on the Google search page, until later. Now Google makes a very large part of their revenue stream from Google AdWords.
Now for all these reasons if you are a local business owner and want to get more customers, you owe it to yourself and your business to get a professional to set up your Google Places page for your business so that people can find you easier online. Remember, if you don’t do this before your competitors do, customers are going away from you and toward your competitors.
If you thought to yourself that you have always wanted to do this, but you never knew how to get started, or you didn’t want to do the work to do it, contact us because this is what we do at Customer Finder Marketing. Invite us do a no-obligation business marketing analysis for your business so that you can get more customers successfully for your local business using the Internet!
Request a personal marketing strategy session, so we can help you create the best marketing plan for your business marketing campaigns and social media on a monthly schedule. More information is available on our home page.