An Update on Local Search

Just a quick follow up to an earlier blog "Local SEO", Google has done it again !!!  Google Places is no more and has been replaced by Google+ Local.  Quite a big change and it happened a few days before I was due to give a social media workshop, 30% of which involved Google Places.

But back to Google+ Local.  You can now setup a Google+ Page as a Local Business or Place.  Go to Google+ and add a new Page.  Select Local Busiess or Place as the category and enter the primary phone number of your business (including area code) and you're off.  A lot simpler than the more tedious process for Google Places.  You can then add in some basic information, a company description, website and contact details as well as your addresss which shows on a Google map, as you'd expect.  A couple of important images are required, very similar to a Facebook page i.e. a banner type image which is quite wide but fairly narrow and a square type image - profile image - which will be used on any posts.  You can also add videos.

Your overall online presence can be compared to your shop front. You display your products and services to the online community hoping to get visitors through the virtual shop door. The more places you can be found online the more potential shoppers will be walking through the door.

Blogging has become an integral part of a company’s online presence. It is a way to communicate to a worldwide audience. It lets people see the characters behind companies and personalises a website. At Be Found we try and get our clients to love their blog.

This feels like déjà vu! Here I am talking about another Google algorithm update and my advice is still the same. But before I give you my pearls of wisdom some background to the latest update. On the 24th of April Google’s Matt Cutts announced:

“While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics,”.