We’ve all done it. You half-remember a restaurant’s name or you want to find a hardware store near you, and you look at your phone and put a few words into Google. It’s a pretty good way to find what you’re looking for. In fact, it’s often our first encounter with a business — their virtual storefront.
What are customers seeing on their phones during that first contact? Something as simple as correct hours and location can bring you a new regular.
But as important as accuracy is “discoverability.” Are customers finding you at all? Floating up to the first page on Google can not only help more customers get to you. It can also make your business more likely to turn up in travel and local guides, which often pull information from Google reviews and business listings.
Think about all the restaurants and stores that didn’t show up on the first page of your search. The ones that get missed or overlooked. How can you keep from being one of those?
Some will try to tell you there are tricks and hacks to get to the top of Google searches. The people at Google are working five times as hard to ensure nobody’s playing games. Their business, after all, depends on you getting reliable, useful results for your search. Trying to trick the algorithms can even end up hurting your listings and your business.
Fortunately, the most reputable ways to be discovered don’t involve anything tricky, and rarely even require much resource investment. In fact, Google itself, along with some of the best and biggest in marketing and SEO share the techniques with you—for free.
But one more thing before we go into the “how.” Even though there are simple do-it-yourself actions you can take to improve your organic search and online presence, an investment in an SEO consultant and/or digital marketing could still be the best thing for your business. Experts in local SEO and narrowly targeted markets can really zero in on the right customers for you—not just the idly curious. When you’re ready to make that jump, try a local marketing or SEO expert first; they’re the ones who best understand your market, right here.
OK—Let’s Get You Discovered.
Step 1: Go to Google My Business and get the basics. Check to see if you’re eligible and familiarize yourself with the rules and standards. If “rules” sounds a little intimidating, rest assured that the process is simple. Google just wants to make sure you actually exist and aren’t fake or a bot.
Step 2: Claim and verify your business. How-tos and more information is on the page. Again, it’s a short and simple process.
Step 3: You can stop there—but you might be missing out on some other ways to optimize your discoverability. Explore more about Google My Business. It’s free, and the services won’t interfere with your existing website. This extensive article, by a noted digital marketing and SEO leader, gives simple, illustrated, step-by-step instructions on how to turn on some of the most useful features. One of these is appointment or reservation booking, for instance—but you’ll want to ask around, check online forums in your business sector, and test to see if such features work for you.
Step 4: Claim your business in other directories, such as the Tenleytown Main Street business directory and app. A listing on a high-quality directory can also be a turbo-boost for your Google discoverability. Make sure your information is correct and all listings and addresses align.
Step 5: Keep it current—an active listing gets better rankings. There’s lots of advice on how to do this: Try to use photos and images; keep your listing accurate; include only high-quality content; respond to reviews; make sure your business website content is top-notch. The biggest mistake: Don’t ever offer an incentive for a review. Google will ding you for this, under the principle that if a reviewer gets a reward, no one can be sure that it’s an honest review.
The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Keeping your search information current, accurate, and welcoming does take a time investment. Google’s policy is to create community through encouraging user-generated content. They want people to write reviews and comments about your business. And as you know, that can open the door both to great discoveries and to trouble.
Google My Business has many notifications and alerts available so you can make sure no one is making waves on your business listing, but business owners need to keep an eye out, too. It can be good to set a regular reminder to Google yourself and make sure everything’s neat. Do a little research on the best ways to respond to negative comments and how to spot a fake review, and set up an action plan.
The stakes are high: 97 percent of consumers looked online for local businesses; 85 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations; and 79 percent of consumers said they had read a fake review in the past year, according to BrightCall’s 2017 Consumer Review Survey.
It’s a tough environment, but you can turn even that to your advantage.
This study report from Harvard Business Review shows it’s worth it:
The rise of review platforms has left firms with a diminished sense of control over their online reputations, leading to questionable practices such as soliciting positive reviews in exchange for perks — or even writing fake reviews. While negative reviews are unavoidable, our work shows that managers can actively participate in shaping their firms’ online reputations. By monitoring and responding to reviews, a manager can make sure that when negative reviews come in — as they inevitably will — they can respond constructively and maybe even raise their firm’s rating along the way.
So as you boost your visibility, prepare yourself and your business plan for what could be ahead—the good and the bad. The stance that gets the best results is the same that serves you in successful real-life customer care: Be real, be prepared, and surrender the idea that you can control others’ reactions. By taking care of business on your virtual storefront, you can be the one consumers trust—and come back to.
Sara Wildberger is a freelance writer and content strategist who helps you use the power of story to reach your business, personal, or nonprofit goals.