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Alan Rabinowitz

What marketing suggestions would you give to a local business owner who is tight on time?

AlanRabinowitz

Answer from Alan Rabinowitz:

Google My Business (GMB). Optimize your listing! 

“Local 3 Pack” is the term for map listings that typically come before the organic results. For local businesses this is one of the largest providers of Search Engine traffic and should be every local businesses goal. Not optimizing this is simply a mistake. Be sure to update the listing and include any products and services in the GMB listings. You can use a local SEO service or try to do it yourself. Manually added and properly created local citations which are basically business directories that list your address calculate into the Google Local 3 Pack ranking factors. My team uses a proprietary strategy of citations that seem to work. That and making sure the on-page SEO of the site is completed to some level. Too much SEO is not always best. In competitive industries its not uncommon to see competitors trying to remove your citations or change the name, phone numbers, business hours etc. So you need to monitor your listings as GMB for changes that Google says it found.

Taking the local SEO to the next level would be to use strategies or a service provider to help with the organic listings as well. There is a correlation to a website’s ranking and trust that Google uses for its GMB algorithm. So this needs to be understood to achieve the most success for local search traffic. Also, Bing offers their version of map listings as well. and should not be overlooked. Bing despite not being as large a provider as Google does drive in a lot of traffic. Being well-rounded in all search engines is always the best solution for traffic.

Alan Rabinowitz is the CEO of SEOImage and can be found on LinkedIn.

Great quotes by Alan Rabinowitz!

At the end of the day, getting your business online and listed in Google My Business is a no-brainer. The Local 3 Pack listings are one of the largest providers for Search Engine traffic so it’s best to take advantage if possible by optimizing them. To do this you’ll need to optimize your GMB listing, make sure on-page SEO is done well enough (which we can help with), and use strategies or a service provider to help with organic rankings as well – there seems to be a correlation between website ranking and trust that Google uses for its GMB algorithm. Bing should also not be overlooked when it comes to driving search engine traffic; being “well rounded” in all types of searches will always provide you with more success than relying solely on one search engine.

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