How Citation Management and Enhanced Content Build LOCAL SEO

When we talk about local SEO it’s fair to say that Google My Business drives a significant amount of traffic for small businesses. It’s imperative that small businesses use Google My Business, which is a free service to help drive customers to their websites, to make phone calls, or to their place of business. However, Google My Business is also a user generated content, or UGC platform, which means this. Anyone can make changes to your business’s Google My Business location.

The best way to solve this potential challenge is to implement a platform that will help you manage citations globally as well as lock, Google My Business, to ensure that changes do not occur, that you have not approved. Citation Management is an umbrella, which protects your NAP or name address and phone for your business. NAP is typically your most critical details about how users can find your brand, location, or call you.

The secondary element that’s available in Google My Business, and other listing sites such as Yelp is enhanced content. This is often overlooked by nearly every business that we have a chance to speak with. Enhanced content breaks down into a number of elements within Google My Business, like services, menus and products. If you’re taking advantage of enhanced content it is a fantastic opportunity when individuals are searching for a service that your business may offer that is not tied to your brand specific name.

As mentioned, it’s a free service. It takes minutes to set up, but it can impact your business in a way that drives significantly more volume of traffic to your website, place of business, or phone calls. That is why NFY Interactive, Inc. created Pendio.com to help small businesses. Take advantage of Google My Business, and to ensure that the most critical information is never modified without your permission. Pendio’s locking feature ensures that even if user generated content could potentially influence your listing data. Pendio will block it and not allow the change to occur on GMB.

Often times, a small change, something incredibly subtle, like a modification in the category, your business is associated to can cause irreparable damage to your business and your brand online. It’s critical to take Google My Business, and internet web citations, seriously. Otherwise, you simply have a business listing that is floating in a massive ocean of user generated content that will absolutely influence your business negatively. In the future, you must take a proactive approach to managing these listings to ensure that your online marketing and brand can prosper in a giant ocean of white noise.

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Optimizing Google My Business helps ensure that your business listing will get the most attention when users are searching for your brand or services. When you first get your listing setup, there are a few things to focus on; which will help you optimize your listing.

Business Name: It is an obvious one, but often times people try to stuff keywords into the business name. While this may bring some sort term gain, this is not an effective brand builder. This also will lock your company into singular services making future expansion harder. If it is on your business card, this is what you should have on your GMB listing.

Phone: Use your primary phone number! You can do call tracking number to track calls from GMB, but with Google’s new call tracking feature, it really isn’t necessary.

Address: Your address is primary going to be used if customers come to your location. Not all businesses have to show their address on GMB, but if you are – make sure your address is correct and you are including any suite numbers, floors, etc.

Category: This is probably one of the most influential elements within the GMB listing. In fact, we have seen businesses grow and shrink based on this selection. It is important that your primary category best describe your business – i.e. Mobile Window Tinting. You can add a secondary category ie. Mobile Tinting. However, if you switch those it is likely that your business listing for Mobile will drop considerably.

Posts: Once you have all of your core INFO completed, make sure you consistently add posts to your GMB listing. This will help add keywords, relevant content and more to your Google My Business Listing. We have seen search results impacted by Posts that cover everything from Brand, Services and Products.

The most important thing to consider is that if Google My Business is asking for specific date fields, complete it if you have information they can use. Leaving information blank simply tells Google you aren’t interested in providing the best presence on their system for their customers… Those customers that could eventually be your customer.