When I presented at the Best of Richmond knowledge session on 14th May, lots of local business owners were keen to find out more about how to create a local business listing on Google – hence this post.

These instructions are intended for those businesses who have 10 or fewer locations – if you’ve more than 10 locations, you’ll need to do a bulk upload – click here for instructions.

Ordinarily there are two steps to getting listed; you’ll need to submit your business details and then verify your listing.

However, in some instances you may find that your business is already listed. Typically (but not exclusively) this tends to happen to restaurants, pubs, bars etc. If when you search for your business on Google maps, you’re already there – you’ll need to claim your listing.

So first things first – search for your business!

Go to Google Maps and type in your business name and location; then skip to the relevant section below depending on whether or not a listing appears for you:

No Business Details Appearing…

1. Go to Google Places
2. If you already have a Google account, sign in with your username and password. If not, you’ll need to create one.
3. Click on ‘add new business’
4. You’ll then be taken to form which you’ll need to complete with your business details
5. Click next, and you’ll be taken to a further form which will enable you to enter more details about your business – the most important part of this is the categories section – Google will suggest categories, but remember you only need to choose one of the categories which they suggest. The remaining four categories are free text – so you can pop in anything you like. These categories will help people to find your business so make sure you’re using terms which people are likely to search for.
6. Throughout the process you’ll be able to see your listing as it will appear on the right hand side of your screen. Once you’re happy with everything – click submit.
7. You’ll then need to verify your listing. This can either be done by post, or by phone. If you elect to go for the post option you’ll receive a postcard with a pin number. Once you receive it, you’ll need to login to your account and submit the pin to verify your listing. If you elect to go for the phone option – make sure you’re sitting right next to the phone and you’ve got a pen at the ready! The phone call comes through almost instantly in my experience – a funny, tinny, automated voice will read out your pin. Login to your account and submit the pin to verify the listing as before.

Business Already Listed…

Google have used a variety of sources for local business listings – e.g. directories, other review sites etc, so it’s actually pretty common to have a listing even if you’ve not submitted the details yourself. If your business is already listed you’ll need to follow the steps below to verify and take control of the listing:

1. Click on the ‘more info’ link alongside your listing
2. You’ve now arrived on your full listing page – click on the ‘Business Owner?’ link
3. If you already have a Google account, sign in with your username and password. If not, you’ll need to create one.
4. You’ll then be asked whether you want to add, edit or suspend your listing – whichever option you choose, you will be asked to verify your listing. This is normally done via postcard – once you’ve verified your listing you’ll see your changes go live.

Hopefully you’ve found this post useful, if you do have any questions, please let me know via the comments, or drop me an email – hannah@gravytrain.co.uk

Image credit Lars Plougmann

Last week I was invited to a ‘Brand Marketing in a Digital World’ session at Google.

Currently in the UK,  total ad spend is £20bn, with 23% of the total spent online. However, there’s a bit of a disconnect when it comes to Brand Marketing –  offline, the split is around 50% on brand marketing; and 50% on direct response. Whereas online, just 5% is spent on brand marketing and the remaining 95% is on direct response.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the primary purpose of the session was to grab some more of that brand marketing budget… well there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right?

However, the session managed to avoid being entirely pitch, and some pretty interesting stuff was shared – so in the interests of share and share alike, I thought I’d share some of it with you.

Undoubtedly digital has profoundly changed both how companies reach their target audience, and indeed the ways in which they communicate with them. Traditionally marketing has been very much about the ”push’ – i.e. transmitting messages from the brand to the consumer. However, increasingly brands are electing to utilise ‘push’ techniques in a slightly different way – rather than simply ‘pushing’ their advertising messages, they are using ‘push’ techniques to encourage consumers to engage with their brands. This stimulates ‘pull’ – i.e. where consumers actively choose to view a brand’s content. ‘Pull’ is essentially about consumer engagement – and of course, here content is king.

The challenge for brands today is to create content which ‘pulls’ consumers in – they actively want to engage with the brand, and perhaps even participate.

Doritos were highlighted as a case study see http://www.youtube.com/user/DoritosYouMakeIt – a campaign (NB this was heavily supported offline too) encouraging consumers to create their own TV ad.

Incidentally – did you know…

1. Video accounts for one third of web traffic, and by 2013 they’re predicting this will reach 90%
2. 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
3. 2bn videos are streamed every day – or in other words, everyone on the planet watches 10 videos per month
4. YouTube is the second largest search engine – proof further (if indeed it were needed) that Bing/Yahoo have a long way to go

Bruce Daisley also highlighted that of course, YouTube is not just for brands… Check out this kid – well it is Friday:

I’ll spare you the rest of the YouTube sales pitch… and instead highlight some free, fun tools which you should definitely go play with:

Google Insights for Search – check out search trends over time.

Google Ad Planner – know what your customers look like? (I mean demographically – not literally) Check out which sites they frequent here.

Twittr Ratr – see whether people are responding to your brand positively or negatively on Twitter (NB this isn’t particularly reliable, but quite fun nonetheless)

Brand Tags – a collective experiment in brand perception. See what people think of famous brands here – tons of fun…

Well that’s all for today folks, hope you have a fabulous weekend

Google have today announced a new link spam detection algorithm, alongside a new form to report competitors with.  While both link spam detection and reporting of link spam have both been possible for many years, today’s announcement could cause the practise of reporting competitors to become more popular.

Whether this proves to be significant will depend largely on whether Google takes the reports submitted seriously. If there is a strong indication that submitting such a report leads to your competitors rankings suffering, it’ll become too tempting for many SEO’s to ignore.

As it becomes increasingly easier to analyse your competitor’s backlinks, it also gets increasingly harder to hide what you are doing.

Such a scenario create a tricky dilemma – are the benefits of reporting your competitors more significant than the drawbacks? While the benefits might seem obvious (your competitor could drop in the SERPS, possibly below you), the drawbacks are probably more complex than you might first think.

Firstly , the new form isn’t anonymous, meaning that you need to submit from an actual Google account , and whilst I’ve no doubt that most would-be-reporters will use a fake/spare Google account for this purpose, it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be traced back to your website. If there is any way of Google knowing who’s behind the report, then you better be sure your website would stand up to similar scrutiny.

Then there’s the problem of shared links – even if you have used a disconnected account to report your competitors from, you might still lose out if you have shared links with your competitor. Should the algorithm be used to apply penalties to sellers (and it likely will be), you might find that Google discounts all links from websites linking to both of you. Imagine you gained a natural editorial link from a website – it wouldn’t be unforeseeable in competitive industries for your competitors to have approached the publisher and ended up paying for a link; in this scenario it’s quite possible that both the editorial and paid links were invalidated.

The ultimate question in both of the above cases would be your view of the playing field – given most websites will likely have some questionable backlinks (even if you haven’t bought links or spammed blogs, there’s previous SEO agencies to think about, ex-employees, competitors, or just being unlucky enough to have attracted links from websites that are usually spammy), your strategic call would depend on where you see your websites links compared with those of your competitors. If you are low in the SERPS but have a much cleaner link profile than your competitors, then you are probably well placed to submit reports.

Even if you do judge yourself of having more to gain though – it doesn’t mean you will actually want to do this. I’ve never personally reported a competitor, and I know many others who would say the same – it just feels wrong. Even if you do feel it’s the right thing to do, do you really have time? It’s kind of like playing a game of Darts – you can try and put off your opponent, but may just prefer to focus on your own game.

All things considered, savvier SEO’s may come to another conclusion altogether – whether or not you choose to report your competitors, future proofing your own links has to be the way forward.

Image credit Drew_