We want to try and put more of the “Interactive” in our blog. Once a week from here on out, we’re going to host a feature called SEO You Should Know. While we are an SEO Firm with dreams of world domination, there is a lot of basic work you can do yourself to help your business in the SEO world. You won’t see the same results as if you had an SEO firm working on your campaign year round, but a little work can go a long way at the start of your search engine marketing campaign.

We’re going to stress the importance of local optimization for you small businesses with storefronts or headquarters, because it’s never been more important than it is right now. Over the next few weeks, we’ll focus on finding, claiming, and optimizing your local profile on four of the heavy hitters; Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yelp (not a search engine, but still a profile that must be optimized).

Google is the benchmark, so let’s start with them. Start by typing your business name and town into the Google toolbar. We want to see three things.

  1. If your business is already listed in Google Places. Your website should come up first if you’re searching your business name and area (unless you have business name that talks about your industry in the name. ex: company named Chicago Pet Day Care will have competition for the top spot of their business name.) You should also see a section with results that have some more information, maybe some pictures, and a little red teardrop that will indicate a spot on a small Google Map. This is your place page. If you see a result but not a place page, let’s look further.
  2. Where is my place page? Even if you have never submitted your business information to Google’s database, it will most likely have information about you. (It may not always be 100% accurate, which is why we’re doing this.) Google crawls the entire web every time it has a search query. It comes back with information it sees connected with your business name; most importantly, your NAP (Name, address, phone number), as well as your industry, reviews about your company, etc. If you aren’t showing up in Google Places at all, and your business has a storefront or centralized location, let’s fix this now. In recent months, Google has placed more and more value on local profiles. Not having an optimized local profile could be costing you valuable search result page real estate, which costs you customers.
  3. Adding Your Business to Google. The first step is creating a Google account. This is as quick and easy as setting up an email account. Follow the steps, put in the required information, and you should be good to go. Once your account is set up, you’ll come to this page. Here, you’ll put in the business name and phone number to see once more if there is already a listing for your business.  If your business still isn’t showing up, Google will bring you to a screen to begin filling in your business listing.  After you fill out as much information as possible, including relevant photos and videos if you have them, click the submit button at the bottom of the page. An important tip is to try and leave no fields blank. The more information you can provide your customers and the search engine, the better.
  4. Verification In Google’s ever-advancing effort to keep only the best of the best showing up for search results, Google has a verification process to make sure you or an authorized representative are the one’s claiming your account and filling in the right info (instead of a disgruntled customer, former employee, competitor, etc.). There are two ways Google can complete this process, phone or postcard.  Choose whatever works best for you.
  5. I found my business on Google, now what? Once you find your place page, you will see on the top “business owner?”. Click on “Business Owner?”, log-in with or create a Google account, and then continue from step 3 above through the filling out and claiming process.

As always, if you have any questions, comment below and we will address your question specifically. In the following weeks, we’ll focus on claiming profiles in other search engines and some quick helpful tips to help you get started with your SEO campaign.