Kinesis marketing and design services

At Kinesis, we optimize many of our clients’ websites. This helps them get found when their potential customers enter specific search terms. Search Engine Optimization (SEO ) is very important component to help your site rank well. We strongly recommend it to our clients.

However, there is a supplemental way that your customers can find you. It’s via a valuable tool provided by Google. It is easy to implement…and it’s free. Yet, it’s underutilized. Google Local Business Center will allow you to list your company when it is combined with a CITY name.

Now, don’t depend on Google Local for search traffic. I want to stress that there is no replacement for a search-engine friendly website with well-written content, meta description tags, keywords, h1 tags, etc. But if you are marketing your business to a local audience, Google Local is an easy-to-set-up potential source of website traffic that complements your other SEO and SEM efforts.

Here’s an example of how this works: We helped our client, Siskiyou Eye Center, set up their Google Local account. If you look at the picture below, you’ll see that their company and website comes up first under the search phrase “Ashland Oregon Eye Center.” It appears BEFORE the number one listed site in the Google organic search results. Pretty powerful, eh?

Here are the steps to get set up in the Local Business Center:

1. Go to Google Local Business Center

2. Sign in to Google (or Create a Google Account if you don’t have one).

4. Click “Add New Business”

5. Enter your business information including name, address, website URL, company description, and the categories that best describe your business (I walk you through this in my video).

6. Click “Next”

7. If it shows your business is already on there, click “claim listing”

8. If it’s not there, click “add listing.”

9. Then you can enter additional details such as hours or operation, photos, payment options, and videos.

10. Click submit

11. At this point, you will need to verify you business by phone (don’t bother with the postcard option since it takes weeks to receive it!). Make sure you use a phone number that you can answer because as soon as you click “Finish,” a Google computer will call you to give you a PIN number.

12.Enter the Google PIN number in your account to verify.

After you are verified, your info will appear on Google Maps. You can go back to the Local Business Center to edit your information or see how many people went to your listing (there are fantastic tracking graphs). You can even ask customers to go to your Local listing to add reviews.

So, click over to the Google Local Business Center and list your business. It’s not much work for a lot of exposure…and it will put you in front of 95% of your competitors.

Kinesis is a Portland Web Design and Branding Firm. We help our clients reach their marketing and growth goals. Call us at 503.922.2289.