Increase Sales by Optimising Your Website for Local Search Results

Google Maps Listings are free and may be worth your time to acquire more business, being the most important of all online directories available.

The term “Citation Authority” means any mention of your business name, phone number, email address – really any “mention” of your business – on any web page, anywhere online. You may have listings on Yelp, Foursquare, Google, etc and these services provide a structured listing in a business directory known as a citation listing that will link back to your business.

If you’re interested in more online exposure and better ranking, having a structured citation is important. Having listings everywhere can help for branding because it’s really about having the best structure and not the most business listings. Allowing Google to optimise your maps may result in your business possibly appearing on other directory listings that automatically crawls and lists businesses.

Quantity is not the deciding factor that will create high rankings – it is the authority that builds the ranking.

Citation and attributes go hand in hand. A combination of the following factors helps determine your authority – Quality, Links, Website Authority, Reviews and Ratings, Images and Categories.

The main components that you want consistent on all of your business listings should be the: Name, Website, Address and Phone Number.

Measuring how a business listing’s authority from one directory to another is called domain authority and page authority. It is a rating system developed by MOZ which is pretty well-known in the Internet Marketing industry.  MOZ has free plugins that you can install in Chrome or Firefox where it will actually identify what the domain or page authority of a web page is. It cannot only tell you what your domain and page authority is but also of your competitors.

Google takes into account about 200 different factors that goes into their ranking algorithm that determines page ranking and domain ranking authority.

If you have a low page authority you should be able to improve it, but it will not be likely that you will move your listing into the number one position immediately.  At any rate, any improvement is good. And this will help you rank better in Google maps and Google My Business search results.

Another factor that helps build your authority is your back-link profile. Back-links are links to your website from blogs, social media, public relations and business directories. Business listings that you have created will receive some SEO juice going to your website which will help your overall page authority.

Unfortunately most websites we see are not optimised for back-links and businesses are missing out on website visitors and sales big time.  Sign up with different business directories using the links from the business directories and share your links to social, blogs and public release websites.

This will you get started with the idea of creating trust and authority for your website by having links to Google My Business that will help you get listed on Google Maps. This not a quick fix and it will take some effort and consistency to get on Google Maps.

Patterson Digital Marketing strongly recommends optimising your website for Local Search and will do it for you.  CALL US on (09) 449 1005 or (027) 489 5009 or email chris@pattersondigitalmarketing.com for a FREE consultation on how to optimise your website.

Chris Kirkham