Does your company appear on the first page of Google?

If you’re a small business owner, I’m sure you’ve heard of Google Places, Google’s free business listing service. And if you haven’t, do a Google Places search and fill out the form and then come back here for tips on how to get more out of your free Google Places business listing.

In 2009, Google relaunched its Business Center on Google Places, which allows local business owners to create a profile of their business, including phone number, address, website, images, videos, business hours, etc. and also mark the location of your business on Google. Map service.

Building a Google Places listing is a great way to get your business (even if you don’t have a website) to appear on the first page of Google search results when someone performs a local search.

A Google Places listing is very easy and straightforward to set up, however what I want to do in this article is to give you some additional tips that will help you get more out of your Google Places listing.

1. Customer reviews – The more reviews you have on your business listing, the better it will work. Firstly, it provides social proof to your customers or potential customers and it will also help keep your listing on top.

A good way to do this is to send your new customers an email asking them to leave a review; this can be done on complete autopilot with an autoresponder or email management service.

Include a link in your email signature inviting existing customers to leave reviews, ask people on your Facebook page, and when people enter your shop/shop.

2. Other business listings – Google discards information from other business directories to verify that phone numbers, addresses, etc. are the same and you also place these listings on your Google Places profile. Make sure all other business listings you create on other directories are consistent.

3. Keywords – This is a very important factor when creating your company listing. If you’re running a house painting business in Parramatta, Sydney, you’ll want to target keywords like “house painting”, “interior house painter”, “exterior house painter”, “residential painter”, etc.

Don’t try to trick Google by putting a bunch of keywords in your business name. For example, if you have a house painting business called ABC Painting Service, you might want to include your business name as ABC House Painting Service.

This way you can get 2 of the targeted keywords “House painting” instead of just “Painting”. to get more keywords may work in the short term, but Google quickly picks up on this and will work against you.