Thursday 29 October 2009 (17:00 - 20:00)
I will be speaking at a networking event at Burn Hall in York about how you can improve your website rank in Google. The event is free of charge and presents a great opportunity to network. For more information and to book your place please click here.
Now more than ever businesses are looking to increase their online presence. In these tough trading times the $64m dollar question is "How do I improve my Google listing?" What better time then to give you some useful tips on how best to use Google Local Business Listings.
Regarded as the number one search engine, Google now includes business listings within its search results. Click here to see a good example of this working.
Initially these listings were collated through data obtained from Thomson Local directories. This means your business may already be included but not fully optimised. To see if your business is already listed go tohttp://maps.google.co.uk and search for your company name.
If you are listed on Google, then the next step is to claim your listing. You can do this by clicking the [more info>>] link and then [Add or Edit your business]. Next, Google provides you with a number of ways to confirm your ownership. The main options are via either post or mobile text message.
If you are not listed on Google, then make the most of this worthwhile business opportunity. To do this, simply clickhttp://www.google.com/local/add/ to go directly to the "Google Local Business Center" where you can add your own listing.
Once you have added, or claimed, your listing there are a number of additional options available to you. These include creating keywords and categories. Again, you should make the most of these opportunities as they can help optimise your listing.
Creating your listing with Google is just the first step to improving your ranking. Optimising it is how you increase your online presence, attract a wider audience and bring in more customers.
Spending money to increase daily website visitor numbers, even to thousands a day, widens your audience. However, the expenditure is probably pointless if the end result is no actual customers. This month I am focusing on this issue, and two of the most common topics raised when I am asked about websites.
There are companies paying hundreds of pounds a month, and more, on keyword advertising. This is the bidding process for chosen terms on search engine sites such as Google Adwords. The results can be impressive. Businesses are happy to declare "We spent £500 last month and received an extra 2,000 visitors to our website." But are they tracking performance? How many of those visitors viewed the website's products and/or services in detail? How many revisited the site? Most importantly, how many of them actually got in touch and became customers?
Keyword advertising can be a great way to get instant results, but you need to be able to measure those results in ways that are meaningful to your business. My advice, if you cannot do this, is to suspend your keyword advertising until you have had some training.
In order to improve your website's customer conversion rate you need to understand visitor behaviour. This is achieved by viewing the daily/weekly/monthly statistics on your website visitors. If you do not have access to your site's visitor statistics then organise this before investing any further in your website.
My tip here is to set this up free by using Google Analytics. This is a popular statistics service providing comprehensive information, the results of which you could find very interesting. Tracking your visitors will enable you to analyse how they use your website and what they are looking for. By understanding what your visitors are interested in when they visit your site, you can take action and turn them into customers. Tracking them can also help you identify where future website improvements and changes are needed.
