Capture Local Search by Optimising your Google Places / Maps Listing

Local search is on the rise.  Every week Bing, Yahoo! and Google are making changes to their search results page to increase the local search results and show you more businesses that are in close proximity to your current location.  If your website’s keywords trigger these local search results, then you need to optimise for local search or miss out on an ever increasing amount of traffic and potential clients.

What is Local Search?

Local search, in terms of search engines, is where results are shown that are associated with your keywords in combination with your location and the location of the businesses in your vicinity.  The search engines basically take an educated guess on whether or not you are looking for a local business and then adjust your results accordingly.  There are two different types of Local Search:

• Explicit Local Search:  This is where you place a geographical location in your search phrase, for example “Office Furniture Sydney”.  This is an obvious sign to the search engines to show you results for that area, for example furniture stores in Sydney.  This also works if you want to conduct searches for areas outside your current location. 
• Implicit Local Search: This is where you enter a search phrase that does not contain a geographical term but is for product or service that people typically use locally.  An example of an implicit local search is “Pizza”.  Google understands that if you live in Melbourne and you want to order Pizza, you probably don’t want it coming from Perth as it’ll be very very cold when it arrives.   Google solves this problem by using some smart tracking tools to figure out where you are searching from and showing you pizzerias that are close to you without having to even say where you are, e.g. “Pizza Melbourne”.

Is my Business a Local Search Business?

This is the easy part, simply go to Google.com.au and type in a search term that someone would use to find your business.  Then look to see if Places results show on the first page of the Google Web results.

Figure 1.0 Local Search Results for “Pizza Clovelly” Google.com.au 

How to Optimise your Google Places Page and Results

There are four main steps to ensure your Google Places account shows as high up as possible on Google.com.au

1. Your Places listing is 100% complete
   
   1. If you don’t have Google places then go to www.google.com/places and either claim your business that is already listed or create a new listing. 
   2. When creating or updating your listing ensure that you complete all the fields including the
      
      1. Description
      2. Categories
      3. Placing in 10 photos of your business or products and services
      4. Placing in videos or additional information
2. Go to other websites where you can list your website and its address including Yellowpages.com.au, HotFrog.com.au and AussieWeb.com.au.  Make sure your business is in their listings and that all the data is accurate and matches with what you have placed in your Google Places listing. 
3. Provide excellent customer service to get yourself some happy customers!  Then politely ask these happy customers to go to Google Maps, search for your business, click on your Places listing and put in a review for you.  The more reviews you have from the more sources the better your Places Page will do in generating traffic.  Make sure these are legitimate reviews; Google is very good at catching fake reviews and then suspending your account.
4. Invest some time or money into SEO.   Google has changed their algorithm so that your websites’ organic rankings now directly affect your Google Places rankings. 

Get Started Today

If current trends continue, all the major search engines are going to increase their emphasis in providing local search results.  The sooner you start optimising your Google Places page and your other local listings, the better your chances of capitalising on this growing traffic source.