The Google My Business Listing is Critical for Businesses

January 20, 2019 By John

If you do not already know, Google My Business is a free tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps.

“Claiming or improving your Google My Business Listing is the singular, most important step you can take for your local business if you want to maximize results from Google Search.” I wrote that in this blog post on September 8. 2017. It is even more true today.

The Google My Business concept is not new. On July 29, 2008 (Yes, over ten years ago.) I wrote a post named Google – Get Local, Get Traffic Quickly about using Google Maps Local Business Center if you want to increase local traffic.

Since 2008, its name has changed several times and Google My Business is much more robust than it was back then. In 2008, there were roughly 173 million websites online. As I write this, there are over 1.9 Billion websites! Obviously, the competition for prominent display space in Google Search results has increased immensely.

Today’s Google My Business (GMB) Listing affords businesses several opportunities to enhance their presence in Google search results and Google Maps. Here is some information directly from Google:

Manage your information:

First it is imperative to “claim” your listing. If you have not, you may do so here: www.google.com/business If someone has claimed your Google My Business listing, go to
Request ownership of a business listing.

Be as complete and accurate as possible when entering your business information. Businesses offering the most detailed and accurate information will be easier for Google to serve your listing in searches.

It’s important to enter your business hours, but equally important to update them whenever they change. You may customize hours for holidays and other special events, and it is up to you to ensure they are accurate. Don’t make enemies because of incorrect hours.

As it does with website SEO, Google uses a variety of signals to serve search results, and including relevant keywords and search phrases to your business listing will help considerably, since your business website is listed directly within your GMB listing.

Interact with customers:
Read and respond to reviews from your customers, and post photos that show off what you do. Businesses that add photos to their listings receive 42% more requests for driving directions on Google Maps and 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses that don’t.

Reviews are now a two-way conversation between you and your customers — be the first to know when you get a new review on your local Business Profile so you can respond right away (this is extremely important).

Photos:
You will likely be surprised how much adding even a couple photos will help the performance of your business listing. Just do it!

Q&A:
Save time by answering your customers’ questions before they ask. With Q&A, customers can easily ask a question right from your Business Profile on Google. To save time, you can pin frequently asked questions and highlight the top answers.

There is much more we could tell you about Google My Business, but the best thing I can do for you is to repeat this: “Claiming or improving your Google My Business Listing is the singular, most important step you can take for your local business if you want to maximize results from Google Search.”

Do it today!

Your Website Should Be Secure

August 20, 2018 By John

For all practical purposes, Google is forcing the use of SSL and HTTPS on all websites! Prior to this, there was no need for you to purchase a SSL Certificate for your website and incur the expense of migrating your website from HTTP to the HTTPS protocol.

What is SSL

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a standard security protocol for establishing encrypted links between a web server and a browser in an online transfer of data. A SSL Certificate is necessary to create SSL connection. Having a SSL Certificate installed on a web server ensures that all data transmitted between the web server and browser remains encrypted.

Google says, “Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as not secure.”

What Needs To Be Done

You must enable SSL for your website which is done through your hosting provider. The SSL Certificates (annual renewal) and implementation choices and costs vary depending on the hosting company and the plan you have. After the SSL Certificate is enabled, all links on your website needs to be migrated from HTTP to HTTPS protocol.

Please see our page, Google Says Your Website Needs to Be Secure for more details, or contact our office, 608-822-3750 or 800-281-9993 or email support@webwisedesign.com.

Have a Local Business? Claim or Update Your Google My Business Listing, Now!

September 8, 2017 By John

If you have a business, you very likely have a Google My Business Listing. Your listing appears when people are searching for your business or businesses like yours on Google Search and Maps.

Claiming or improving your Google My Business Listing is the singular, most important step you can take for your local business if you want to maximize results from Google Search.

“Why,” you ask? Google says, “Manage how your business information appears across Google, including Search and Maps, using Google My Business — for free.”

The keyword in the previous paragraph is “manage.” There is little a business can control when it comes to Google. When Google makes it easy to post correct information about your business for free, and that information is displayed in Google Search results and on Google Maps, you should take advantage of it.

With Google My Business, you can:

Increase your online visibility
Show business hours and if open/closed
Your contact details are prominently displayed
Display photos of your business
Publish Posts just like Facebook or Twitter posts
Encourage reviews and interact with reviewers
Answer customer questions — List FAQs, or answer live
Let customers message you

You also can see insights on how customers searched for your business, and their locations at the time of search. You can also see how many people called your business directly from the phone number displayed on local search results in Google Search and Google Maps.

Bottom line: Claim and/or update your Google My Business listing! It is unequivocally the best and least expensive online marketing you can do.

Why WebWise Pays So Much Attention to Google Search

April 2, 2017 By John

Our clients and prospects hear us talk a lot about Google Search. Here is one reason why.

Talk with us. We’ll tell you more! 1-800-281-9993 or 608-822-3750

Google Has Made Twitter More Important To Your Search Strategy

May 28, 2015 By John

As some of you know, Twitter plays an important part of many Social Media marketing strategies. With a Google announcement on May 19, 2015, Twitter gained importance in search strategy and SEO, especially for businesses with audiences that are primarily mobile users.

“Starting today, we’re bringing Tweets to Google Search on mobile devices. So now when you’re searching on the Google app or any browser on your phone or tablet, you can find real-time content from Twitter right in the search results.” — Google

The most important part of this is that your Tweets (with a link to your website) potentially reach Google search users, not just your Twitter followers. When you think about it, this is much bigger than it seems. Now, it is possible Google search results could include a normal listing for one of your pages AND a Tweet that links to a landing page on your website as well.

Please remember, this is Google, so your Tweet still has to earn its way into the Google’s search results page listings. It is too early to know just how that happens, but it is a given your Tweet, the link in it, and the link’s landing page will have to be relevant to the searcher’s intent. Of course having a Twitter account with active followers who retweet your Tweets, is certainly a good thing. As this new Google-Twitter deal starts to take effect, real-time trending Tweets are what is showing most frequently.

For those of you yet to embrace the fact that your website visitors are just as or more likely viewing your website on a mobile device, here are a couple of blog posts to read.

In April, 2015, comScore reported, the “Number of Mobile-Only Internet Users Now Exceeds Desktop-Only in the U.S.”

With phones the “central devices,” the number of “connected devices” is changing and growing rapidly.

Make no mistake, the Google-Twitter deal will beneficially impact many businesses that are using Twitter regularly and well.

If you are looking for more mobile visitors to your website, you should consider ramping up your Twitter presence and campaign. Of course, your website has to be Google mobile-friendly as well.

We can help! Contact or Call us Today at 1-800-281-9993 or 608-822-3750

Google Changes The Rules – Mobile-Friendly or Not

April 21, 2015 By John

If Google does as stated, today is the day many small business websites disappear from Google Mobile Search Results. Of course, not only SMBs will suffer, but so will churches, associations, and other non-profits. A few major corporations will be surprised as well.

We understand the importance of mobile in today’s world. Nearly all the new websites we create are device-responsive, and have a mobile-friendly version, as defined by Google, as well as a desktop version.

The vast majority of the websites we have created in the last few years look great and work well on desktops and tablets, as well as phones with “full-browser” capabilities. With smaller devices, the user will have to pinch and stretch some, but they will function. We did create fully mobile-friendly versions for some of our clients websites who chose to be out front in the mobile revolution. Even a year ago a mobile-friendly of a website was a hard sell for us and most other developers, especially those of us who have small businesses and non-profits among our clients.

Google seems to think everyone has deep pockets and/or a development team to create exactly the type of website they deem appropriate. They constantly tweak Google Analytics and Google AdWords. Sometimes the tweaks are amazing and time saving. Sometimes they are amazing and very time consuming.

Google wrote this Finding more mobile-friendly search results post on February 26, 2015, and followed with this announcement Rolling out the mobile-friendly update today.

Here is an excerpt from that post.

“April 21st’s mobile-friendly update boosts mobile search rankings for pages that are legible and usable on mobile devices.

Affects only search rankings on mobile devices
Applies to individual pages, not entire websites

While the mobile-friendly change is important, we still use a variety of signals to rank search results. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal — so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query.”

You may check using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see if Google classifies your website as mobile-friendly.

It is too soon to know the impact of Google’s latest forced mandate. Every website owner should review their analytics program to see what percentage of traffic is mobile. Remember Google separates tablets traffic from mobile, as most tablets display the desktop version of a website. Once you determine the percentage and number of mobile visitors (and what they do while on your site), you will have to decide if having fully mobile-friendly (as defined by Google) is right for your customers and prospects. Only you know what percentage of mobile traffic meets your pain threshold. Please remember that for this purpose, the mobile statistics, are only valid going backwards in time. Mobile search results change dramatically as of today!

If you have any questions, please contact us.

Ok, Google! How Does Voice Search Impact SEO?

November 13, 2014 By John

Voice searches (Ok Google and Siri) are rapidly changing how people search, and the way Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines evaluate web pages for inclusion in Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) rankings. Aided by Google’s Humming Bird algorithm’s ever-growing ability to understand longer, conversational queries, and user’s search intent, voice search now plays a huge roll in how well a given page does in search results.

Voice-enabled searches tend to use longer and more conversational queries. Those queries along with other factors (localization and personalization being two major contributors) and the devices used while searching produce different results than traditional, shorter queries made using a keyboard and desktop computer.

Obviously, most voice searches are done on phones and other mobile devices. Of course, the display area for search results is limited in relation to the size of the device being used. Many people will see very few listings without scrolling. Ranking high in search results becomes even more important.

If your website copy has not been changed much lately, you should take another look at it. If your website pages are written like a master’s degree dissertation, you will not likely do well in results of voice searches. Today’s website copy should be written in a more conversational manner, similar to the way we speak with each other. Your copy should speak to the reader.

The number of searches done on mobile devices also makes it more important to have a mobile friendly website. Google’ algorithms detect whether a website is mobile friendly or not. Those that are get preference over websites that are not mobile friendly.

Ok, Google! What’s next?

If Travelers & Local Business Are Important To You, So Is Yelp

June 9, 2014 By John

Does your business depend on travelers or local customers?

If the answer is yes, you need to take a look at your Yelp listing. While you may never have heard much about Yelp, it can be very important to you if you have a business that relies on transient and/or “local” business.

Nearly every Google, Bing, or Yahoo search for a “local” business returns listings that include one or more Yelp listings in the results. That is especially true if the search is done on a mobile device.

How important are those people using mobile devices? A “Local Search” study recently released by comScore, Neustar Localeze and agency 15 Miles, reveals that “78 Percent Of Local-Mobile Searches Result In Offline Purchases.” ComScore also observed, “Nearly half of all service, restaurant and travel searchers were looking for a business they have never made a purchase from before.” The implications and importance should not be overlooked or undervalued.

Yelp’s listings are often near the top of local search results. One of the reasons is their reviews. In addition to being prominent in Google search results, Yelp provides reviews by its “Yelpers” for Apple Maps, as well as listings and reviews on Bing, and since February of 2014, Yahoo. Yelp also signed a deal with Yellow Pages. The agreement allows YP to enhance its customers’ business listings on Yelp, and expand their distribution within the YP Local Ad Network to include Yelp’s vast audience of consumers.

Reviews are arguably the most important element of Yelp.

Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines are paying more and more attention to and using “social signals” (in varying degrees) when ranking search results. Of those “social signals” the importance of reviews is significant. The number of people talking about your business and what they are saying has an impact on how well your web pages rank in search results.

If you have a business, especially one with a physical storefront, you likely have a Yelp listing. Don’t take a chance that they have your business information correct. Claim your business listing, so it is displaying as you would have it. I should note, they will likely try to upgrade you to a paid account. It is not necessary for a basic listing. You will have to make your own decision about the value of upgrading.

Of course, Yelp is only part of the equation, there are at least six other major players when it comes to Local Search. You may read about them and find links to where you may update your local listings in our earlier blog post, Take Control of Your Local Search Listings Now!

Don’t put it off. Update your Yelp listing today.

Keyword SEO is Not Enough – 8 Steps to Fixing

May 12, 2014 By John

That statement is certainly not a great revelation. However, it is worth repeating. While it has never been a case of “build it and they will come” for websites, many think a Search Engine Optimized website will automatically do well for nearly any search using keywords related to what their website offers. It seems that many people think that “Keywords” = SEO. Obviously, that has always been an overly simplistic view, but keywords do play a big role in getting a given web page displayed in search results. That said, there is much more to SEO, and certainly more to generating traffic to your website.

How people use the Internet and Web has dramatically changed.

Much that happens on the Internet no longer includes viewing a web page. It happens on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, various chat platforms, regular email, newsletters, and other platforms. People are using phones and other mobile devices, not just desktop computers. When internet activity does involve viewing a web page, in many cases the visitor came from a link in content on one of the aforementioned platforms and devices.

How Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines evaluate and rank available content on the web that can be displayed in Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) rankings has dramatically changed as well. Reportedly, Google has over 200 Ranking Factors. Only a portion of those have to do with on-page SEO.

On top of that, with Google’s “Universal Search” results displaying many elements in addition to traditional snippets and links to relevant websites. Search results may now include (not all at the same time) the following.

Site Links (6 pack)
Google Map + Pins
Local Carousel – Photos
List Carousel – Just that, grouped list of results
Knowledge Panel – Top Right, info related to query
Google AdWords – Top, Right Column, Bottom

Answer Box
Image Mega-Block
Video Results
News Results
Social Results
In-Depth Articles

Where eight to ten traditional listings were once displayed for a query, now there are often only three or four. The competition for results page real estate is very real.

It is this simple. Traditional on-page, keyword search engine optimization, is not enough by itself to achieve high rankings in search results. What you do online other than on your website, and what others say about your business and your web presence, impacts your website traffic.

Here are 8 steps to fixing your search results rankings.

Have a quick-loading, attractive, relevant, and frequently updated website.
- Google includes site speed in their 200 ranking “signals”
Well-written content that visitors find of value, and worthy of sharing
- Compelling content that conveys your value proposition for your product or service
On-Page Search Engine Optimization done correctly, including headings and internal links
Add a blog, or “what’s new” page that has fresh and compelling content
Don’t forget any given keyword has to be on a web page to show up in search results
Create and use at least one or two Social Media accounts
Place Social Media share and follow buttons on your website
Send a monthly email newsletter (include links to your website) to clients and prospects

I know. It sounds like more work and time, and it is. That said, in today’s rapidly and constantly changing online world, Keyword SEO is Not Enough.

1-800-281-9993 or 608-822-3750 or contact@webwisedesign.com

Have an Old Website That No Longer Ranks Well in Searches?

March 10, 2014 By John

For years, many have believed the age of a domain name is a factor in Google search results rankings. We have seen anecdotal evidence that it seems to be true, to a point. Google’s Matt Cutt’s answer to a related question in a Google Webmaster Tools video prompted this post.

Does this sound like your business?

Your domain name was registered several years ago.
You had a website before a lot of others understood the importance.
Your website was doing pretty well in Google for many keyword searches
Lately, the last statement is no longer the case.
You are wondering why you no longer do as well in Google SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) rankings.

Does this sound like your business or organization?

You have not done any meaningful updates to the content on your website in years
You have not redesigned the look and layout of your website
Your photos and graphics are not optimized to be fast loading
You are not using Social Media
You have not included Social Media share & follow buttons
Your competitors have been doing all of the above

Take a fresh look at your website to see just what visitors are experiencing, and compare that to what they experience on your competitor’s or other similar websites.

Don’t just listen to us. See for yourself what Google’s Matt Cutts says in his video, “How can an older site maintain its ranking over time?“