Moving into paid search territory can be daunting for many businesses. It’s an added expense, and creating an effective campaign takes time.
Despite the challenges, PPC (pay-per-click, paid search) can be a great way for businesses to target their market, gain visibility and drive leads in a cost-effective manner. (And despite the insider jargon and cryptic acronyms, pay-per-click advertising isn’t as complicated or difficult as you might think.)
When you create a new listing in Google’s Local Business Center (LBC), you may be prompted if there are existing listings for your business. For those unfamiliar with the LBC, it’s where you create a business profile that shows up in Google Maps, as well as the natural search listings. Here’s an example:
Why would there already be a listing for your business? Because Google sometimes creates listings for businesses that have not yet created their own, and it does this by pulling information from sources across the web, including human-powered directories. It’s common that these Google-gathered listings have errors—for example, you may have changed your phone number or relocated since Google gathered its information.
There is often much confusion on what the proper steps are when you discover more than one existing local listing for your business in the search engines. The thing to do is claim and edit the existing listing.
It’s important to remember: For each physical location of your business, you should have only one listing. Having more than one can negatively impact the position of all of your listings, decreasing your visibility among local prospects (bad).
What if there are multiple listings? Google has recommended some steps to take to properly handle multiple listings for their Local Business Center:
- Choose the listing that you’d prefer to keep in your account. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing and this listing only.
- For duplicates of this listing in your account (the ones you want to remove), remove all enhanced information. Keep only required information, like the business title, address, and one phone number.
- Submit these changes and verify as necessary.
- Now, sit tight for a couple of weeks – just for good measure.
- Delete the duplicates from your account, choosing Remove this listing from my Local Business Center account.
The key point to remember is that it’s crucial to have one optimized listing for your business. This entry should have all of the additional information and be as close to 100 percent complete as possible. Local search has a ton of potential for small business and creating this optimized listing can dramatically increase your visibility among your target market and create a steady stream of free inbound leads.
Yes, it’s true: Some people continue to use phone books.
But today’s consumer increasingly favors that great information repository known as the Internet, and they use search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to find what they’re looking for. With this change comes a new mandate for businesses: make sure your web site gets found.
So how does one get found in the search engines? If your business serves a competitive market, just having a web site doesn’t mean you’ll rank for key search terms. Google may list your competitors ahead of you in the search listings, and studies show that searchers rarely even look at the results beyond the top three. If you’re not in the ‘Golden Triangle’ you’ll get crumbs for clicks while your competitors get all the action.
We can help. We’re offering a free three-part webinar on search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing your web site’s content and code for better placement in the search results. It also involves off-site factors, such as acquiring inbound links (which Google interprets as votes) from other web sites.
The series will help businesses ‘SLEEP’ their way to the top of the search results. (SLEEP: search, leverage, evaluate, estimate, perform). At the end of the series, we’ll provide attendees with a free SEO checklist that will help you apply what you’ve learned to your business’ web site. Register for the webinar today!
Register here for Kutenda’s free three-part webinar series on how small and midsized businesses can SLEEP (Search, Leverage, Evaluate, Estimate and Perform) their way to the top of the search results.
As we mentioned in a previous post, if you want to meet new prospects and close more sales in today’s internet focused world, you need to be visible in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) for the search terms/keywords that are relevant to your business, a goal achieved through search engine optimization (SEO).
Problem is, SEO can be confusing for small and midsize businesses that don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to optimizing their company presence online. We’ve got the solution: Kutenda’s free three-part webinar series on how small and midsized businesses can actually SLEEP their way to the top of search results. Register today.
James Omdahl, our director of online marketing, will walk you through Kutenda’s SLEEP (Search, Leverage, Evaluate, Estimate and Perform) technique and provide the best practices, tips and tricks you need to start driving qualified traffic to your web site today.
Throughout the three sessions, James will demystify the optimization process so that you can grow your business online no matter the size of your marketing team/budget. All attendees will receive a free checklist designed to help you get started immediately.
Who should attend
Internet marketing beginners, small business marketers, and anyone else who wants to improve SEO.
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