Are you a resolutions person?

‘Tis the season for setting goals, whether they are personal or professional. 

I’d like to share a resolution with you that is guaranteed to be simple and have positive results for your business. It will only take a few minutes but it may bring you more customers and provide for a better customer service experience.
 

In this day and age when so many customers turn toward search engines to look up information, it’s really important that they can find your business. Most businesses make sure they have a physical sign to direct people. Your business listing is your digital sign that directs customers and provides basic information. 
 

Best of all, you can do this for FREE! Hard to get a better deal than that.

I’m going to use Google as the example, since it has nearly 90 percent of the search engine market.

First of all, you don’t need a website to check your business listing. Your decision to have a website and how it can help your business is a topic for another day. But if you have an address, phone number and are open for business, you’re listed somewhere on the internet. 

To sign up, go to www.google.com/Mybusiness
 

Once you’ve claimed your business, you can set the hours, check the phone number, address and directions. It’s also very easy to add photos and even respond to customer reviews. There’s also a mobile version. 

If you’re a fan of Google maps, you can also find your business and claim it.

Aside from making sure that your information is correct, claiming your business may also help you improve your local results ranking. Google uses relevance, distance and prominence to help determine which businesses come up when people search. 

Here is how Google describes the process:

“Relevance

Relevance refers to how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for. Adding complete and detailed business information can help Google better understand your business and match your listing to relevant searches.

Distance

Just like it sounds – how far is each potential search result from the location term used in a search? If a user doesn't specify a location in their search, Google will calculate distance based on what’s known about their location.

Prominence

Prominence refers to how well-known a business is. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels, or well-known store brands that are familiar to many people are also likely to be prominent in local search results.”

If you don’t have a website or much presence on the web, that will factor into your prominence rankings. That gets into the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here’s how Google describes it:

“Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business's local ranking. Your position in web results is also a factor, so SEO best practices also apply to local search optimization.”

You cannot request or pay Google to have a better local ranking. “We do our best to keep the details of the search algorithm confidential to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.”

But it’s no secret that making sure you have accurate information about your business is a good start. 

There you have it. If you haven’t claimed your business yet, make sure that you get it done in 2020. You’ll be glad you did.