How To Get Your Business On Google Using Free Google Tools

Engage With Customers On Google For Free

Getting your business on Google by leveraging Google’s own free tools is easier than you think! Whether you’re an established company or just starting up, the more visible you are on the internet, the easier it will be to improve your digital marketing and achieve your business goals.

Over 100 Billion searches are performed on Google every month. So, if your business is not discoverable on Google, you are losing out on a huge business opportunity. Fortunately, Google makes it easy for small business to list their business on Google products such as Maps, Google+ and on search engine.

Google My Business is a free tool that lets you list your local business easily. Its a great way to build your web presence and generate more leads.

That helpful information box is what google calls a “knowledge graph. ” it’s a block that’s generated from company details listed on Google’s business platform, google my business. This is the online portal many businesses bow to as the queen bee of local search. Google my business gives you tools to showcase your company’s information, engage with customers and gain helpful insights on how users are interacting with your knowledge graph. The great part about it is— it’s all free. All you need to do is sign up for an account to start telling the world’s largest search engine about your business. After you’ve logged into the platform, it’s easy to add your site to google by building your online profile.

How do customers engage with your listing once they find it? With google my business insights you can see if they visit your website, call your business, or request directions. Other google my business insights include:

• • Day of the week customers call
  • Photo views
  • Search query

These valuable insights allow you to learn about your business visibility on google and areas of improvement. Google my business insights is just one of the many free features you get with your listing.

Get Customers With A Great Business Profile

Photos and videos are a great way to stand out in search results. This feature allows both business owners and customers to add photos on your google listing. Take advantage of this feature by showcasing your products and services. Also, customize your profile image, cover photo, and more to stand out.

But First Verify Your Business With Google

You need to verify your business with Google. Usually they will require a postcard be sent out to the business address.  Most postcards arrive within 14 days. Sometimes Google doesn’t require postal verification. However, most of the time they do. The postcard includes a unique verification code that you must enter in google my business to confirm that your business is located at the listed address.

While you wait, you can prepare for online success:
First, visit your business website as if you’re a customer who found it through google search or maps. Take time to review and enhance your site and update any incorrect information. Take pictures of your business and the products and services it provides. These photos make great additions to your google my business profile. You can even take customers inside your space with street view. For extra traction, GEO tag your images to your location.

Make Your Google Profile Stand Out And Work For You

To add images including your logo, cover image, and other images of your business, go to your google my business dashboard and click on “photos” at the top of the page. You should also take every chance you get to encourage customers to rate and write a review for your business on google maps. Happy customers with great ratings and testimonials will help to attract more prospects to your business.

The Value Of Google My Business Websites

Don’t have a website yet? Don’t worry. With the Google My Business platform, you can build a free website. It’s easy to create and edit the site from your computer and phone. The feature is mostly free, although there is a cost to get a custom domain if needed. But what if you already have a site? Build your Google website as well. Every time you make a post on your GMB, it automatically updates to your Google website. This is a great opportunity to add other links in the post to your other online web assets such as your map url, YouTube channel and other social properties.

Driving Organic Traffic With Google

For those in the business of trying to drive organic traffic, Google is the all-powerful. It crawls the web, determining which pages are the most useful and relevant for its users for virtually any topic. We don’t just trust Google’s results, we rely on them. With such immense power and influence, getting your small business on the first page of Google might seem unrealistic, however, it this very power Google holds that makes it more possible than ever for small and local businesses to rank high in search results—for free! But it takes knowing how to accomplish this.

GMB Reviews Are Important!

85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Which is why online reviews are essential for customer acquisition and satisfaction. To deliver the most relevant and beneficial results for local searches, Google reviews not only want to know what your business does, but how your business is perceived. Reviews offers an opportunity to get immediate customer feedback while building confidence in your business and increasing visibility on local results. Be sure to give your customers a review link, either through a link or a clever QR code. That makes it easy for the customer to leave a review.

More Solutions From Google

Local business owners, this one’s for you. Within the broader SEO world, there’s an area known as local SEO, where Google helps direct location-specific searchers to solutions in their geographic area. Why is this important? Essentially, most people will still first turn to Google’s search box to find the business they’re looking for before taking a stroll down main street. Google My Business is the response to this reality.

It is a directory of business listings that populates what appears on Google maps, as well as what’s displayed in the ‘local 3 pack’ (that highly coveted map and three business options that appear at the top of searches with a specified location).

So, let’s get this straight. How exactly does this local feature help your business get found more easily? In addition to keywords, it’s just one more way of hinting to Google that your business will be a quality result to suggest to its users.

How to Get to the Top of Google Search Results

Google’s search results are getting more robust— with knowledge panels, answer boxes, expandable related questions, local results , and more. With so many ways to stand out, working for top ranking is well worth the effort, especially considering that traffic and click-through rate fall off precipitously as one works their way down the search results. Traffic and engagement falls off precipitously after the first few results.

It’s a known fact that the first page of Google search captures the majority of traffic, but did you know that there are significant differences in click-through rates for the top vs bottom results? One study shows the following click-through rates by Google position:
• first result: 36. 4% clickthrough rate
• second result: 12. 5% clickthrough rate
• third result: 9. 5% clickthrough rate

CTR continues to decline, down to 2. 2% for the 10th result (there are usually 10 organic results max per page, even less now with local results, ads, answer boxes, and other new features. If you’re not at the top of the search results, you are missing out on a lot of clicks.

How To Get To The Top Of Google Search With PPC Ads

Do you ever click through to the second page of Google’s search engine results? No. No one does. In fact, less than 3% of searchers make it to the second page. Understandably then, most business owners who come to us are wondering how to get to the top of Google search results.

There are several suggestions to get your business on page one of Google (even Wikihow has something to say about it)—but we have a tried-and-true method of making it happen. But first, you’ve got to understand that there are a few different areas of Google’s search results you can rank #1 for: rich snippets, PPC ads at the top, organic listings at the bottom, and local map listings in the middle.

That means you have four separate opportunities to rank your content on page one. One philosophy and strategy to get that spot on the first page and outrank competitors starts by breaking it down into solving four main questions, each one aimed at a different part of the search results page:

1. How do you get a Google featured snippet?
2. How do you get your pay per click (ppc) ads on page one of Google?
3. How do you use search engine optimization (seo) to get your website to the top of Google?
4. How do you get into the 3-pack map?

Rich Snippets Are Great Value

Top results for google searches now also populate “position zero” answer boxes, otherwise known as featured snippets: earning a top spot on google could lead to getting featured in a featured snippet, granting your business immediate exposure and increasing your credibility.

Featured Snippets are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google’s search results in order to quickly answer a searcher’s query. The content that appears inside of a Featured Snippet is automatically pulled from web pages in Google’s index. Common types of Featured Snippets include definitions, tables, steps and lists.

The easiest way to earn a featured snippet spot is to produce quality content and format it in a way that Google will love. You have to make your content “snippable” so that Google will recognize your link. If you’ve already got some links with high rankings, you’re in luck.

Using Pay Per Click For Better Results

PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.

Search engine advertising is one of the most popular forms of PPC. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering. For example, if we bid on the keyword “PPC software,” our ad might show up in the very top spot on the Google results page.

Google Ads operates on a pay-per-click model, in which users bid on keywords and pay for each click on their advertisements. Every time a search is initiated, Google digs into the pool of Ads advertisers and chooses a set of winners to appear in the valuable ad space on its search results page.

How to Get Your Website To The Top Of Google With SEO

You might think that Google is omniscient, but even the most powerful rulers need a little help sometimes. While your website will inevitably be found at some point by the google bots constantly crawling the web’s content, you can take a few actions to speed up this process. The first step is giving Google a quick heads up that you exist by submitting your site to Google. You can do this by sending over your sitemap to Google search console. Not sure how? Google it! It’s the tech equivalent of waving hello and giving Google a little nudge to speed up the indexing of your website.

How to Get Your Business On Google Maps And Increase Local Leads From Local SEO

It is well known that getting into the 3-pack on Google maps can be really profitable for you and/or your client. In fact, it is often the key performance indicator that clients look for when they come to us for local SEO services or leads. That being said, many people struggle with this. If you do your due diligence and you properly optimize your listing, that is a very good first step. Be sure to have a consistent N.A.P. (Name, Address and Phone Number) on all your online properties.

In a competitive niche you may even have to do some authority backlinking to boost your GMB.  There are other simple ways to rank higher in Google maps for the city you are verified in. For example…using other Google properties to link back to your business page. Note: it is very hard to rank a competitive keyword in a city’s 3-pack if your GMB address is not listed in that city. Preferably, your listing will be near the city center.

How can local search engine optimization (lseo) help get your business on Google maps?

My Business is Google’s one-stop shop to manage how your business will look and perform in the search engine. It is an essential tool to find out and adjust how your site shows in Maps, the Knowledge Graph, Google+, and organic search results. According to the most recent edition of Moz’ Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, Google My Business continues to be the biggest driver of local SEO success, with quality links coming in at a close second.

Other Strategies For Getting To The Top Of Google Search Results

One of the most critical steps to ranking your site higher is by creating valuable, high-quality content that people will want to read and link to. 90% of the most successful content marketers in a Content Marketing Institute study put their audience’s information needs as a top priority.

When your content offers value to your audience, it will make them stay on your site for longer. This can positively affect your rankings. Be sure to do proper keyword research for your business niche.

Before we dive into how to get to the top of google search, you should know what the ranking factors are that google looks for:
“you want the answer, not billions of webpages, so google ranking systems sort through the hundreds of billions of webpages in our search index to give you useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second. These ranking systems are made up of a series of algorithms that analyze what it is you are looking for and what information to return to you. And as we’ve evolved search to make it more useful, we’ve refined our algorithms to assess your searches and the results in finer detail to make our services work better for you.

Here are some valuable tips on reaching the top of search:

• Create content that adds value
• Create more long form content (3,000 words or more)
• Optimize for Google Answer Box
• Keep a close eye on the competition
• Improve your internal structure
• Optimize your anchor text
• Display rich snippets in search
• Optimize your URLs

Get Your Business To The Top of Google With Quality Digital Marketing Services

Through quality local search engine optimization (SEO) services, they can help your business achieve higher rankings in your local search results. No matter if you have a single location serving a local community or multiple locations across the state or country, they should have proven strategies and tactics to help you rise above your competition.

In order for your website to reach its full ranking potential, you must provide Google and other major search engines with the foundational elements of SEO. These include optimized title tags, URL structure, on-page keyword strategy, link-building and more. Once this technical foundation is established it will be much easier to rank. For the average, busy, small business owner it often is better to engage the services of a professional.

Google Product Listing Ads

If your business operates an ecommerce site, google product listings ads represent another way to get your site (and products) featured on the first page of google:.

A local search phrase includes keywords like “near me,” or a specific location like a city, district, or address. For local searches, google no longer gives websites the prime real estate. Right beneath the ads, at the top, you don’t see the top serps. You see the top local business listings. And that’s a big deal. Local searches have become a qualified step in the buyer’s journey. Most of the time, consumers that look for more product information on their phone end with a local google search.

Book Services Feature

When people find your business on Google, they can also book your services right from your business listing. Then, you can easily track all the bookings that come from your google local listing. To enable the booking button, sign in to your Google my business account and choose one of the scheduling partners. After you finish building your business listing, it’s time to optimize it for local search results.

According to Adweek, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying , and Google is the go-to for this. With answer boxes, the “people also ask” section, and local results showing contact information, maps, reviews, ratings, and descriptions, Google’s search engine results page alone enables consumers to learn about, compare, and engage with your business before even clicking on your result.

Now that you understand the features and importance of google my business in the local search results, don’t forget to optimize it for maximum performance. But first…you MUST claim and verify your business location: this ensures you have access to your business information and google will show it in the search results.  Then you can go on optimizing from there. And, foremost, respond to reviews! Ask and respond to reviews from every customer, whether they are negative or positive – this is what potential and current customers notice. And how you handle customer service can easily take you from a 3-star rating to a 5 star rating.

If you follow the steps in this guide you will be well on your way to succeeding with getting your business to show up on the first page. Good luck with your endeavors!

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