Next time you do a Google search for a business or an industry in your area, you’ll likely see a map appear in your search results along with a variety of different businesses in this industry that service your area, pin pointed on the map. As an example, I’ve pasted the map shown after doing a search for “bicycle repair vancouver” :
Now that you’re abundantly familiar with this, as you’ve no doubt witnessed it hundreds of times, you might be interested to know how important it is to have your business listed in these local business listings. First, think about where this map appears in the search results: at the top of the page occupying prime real estate, just below the top-level sponsored ads and above the regular organic search results. Obviously, Google is sending a message about the importance it’s placing on it’s local business listings – for specific industry searches, Google is saying that its local business listings are even more important that its conventional organic listings, upon which it made its name.
If that isn’t enough to persuade you to ensure your business is listed in the local business listings, consider this: after recently doing a mid-term site analysis for a client, I found that local business listing traffic coming to this client’s site vastly exceeded regular organic traffic. Seeing as it is absolutely free to add your local business listing, it would be nonsensical to say no to significant and targeted traffic.
Also keep in mind that many Google users are ‘visual’ searchers, meaning they’re much more likely to observe and take action with a visual search representation, like a map. Google recognized this when they conceived the idea for local business listings, and have had great success after implementing this strategy.
To take advantage of Google’s local business listings and to help gain more traffic to your website for your business, contact us and we’ll make sure your local business listings is optimized and set up properly.