Google Listings and Things You Should Know
Google uses predictive intelligence (artificial intelligence) to determine what results to show you. Google gathers an inappropriate amount of data on your browsing habits and any personal information they can glean. In fact, your profile is probably being updated as you read this article. So what does that exactly mean?
Google’s job is to provide you with the best possible search results for you—not for the world. The results you get when searching for your type of business in your local region is specific to your own search history. If you’d like a non-biased search (really a less biased search), you can always try searching from an incognito window.
So really, based on how you search, where you are, what sites you visit, what device you use to search (mobile vs non) will return different results. Simply Googling yourself everyday to see where you rank will actually make things worse. If Google serves your business up first and you keep refreshing the page to see where you rank, Google thinks it’s done a bad job of returning quality results and will constantly try to make you happy by giving you other options and you’ll be mad/sad/angry at your digital marketing company. So seriously knock that s*** off!
Here is what you need to do with your Google listing instead:
Make sure your Google My Business page is 100% complete. Address, hours, phone, email, website, photos, reviews, etc.—do the entire thing. Or, better yet, hire my web presence marketing firm to do it (It’s really super fun for us).
More than 90% of Google business listings are incomplete or non-existent. To take it a step further, we’ll even build out the next 30-90 business directories that are going to matter to your overall business. They call this Local SEO, but we call it “fishing where the fish are.”
50% of all local searches result in store visits within 24 hours.
(Believe it or not, that statistic is actually true)
Watching your own listing to see that it’s coming up is going to drive you “bat poo crazy” so just make sure it’s as close to complete as possible and keep people going to your site through content marketing—quality compelling and engaging content. Content marketing is far more important than clicking refresh over and over again to see where your map listing resides amongst your competitors.
And guess what? Post Launch does content marketing AND directory creation. You should give us a call and we’ll help you with your local SEO or whatever your business needs to succeed online.
