If you have a store front, a retail shop, or a restaurant, you should have a Google Places listing. If you’ve searched on Google’s Map for businesses in your area, you’ve seen Google Place listings as the set of results.

This article details the tips and tricks to get the most out of your Google Places listing, so your place can be found online. Hopefully, you are reading this BEFORE you add your business to Google Places, but if you’ve already added your place, keep reading for some nuggets of value to boost your place’s performance.

Other Business Listing Sites

This internet cafe takes advantage of the white space of their storefront.

Believe it or not, Google doesn’t totally trust you. They place trust in other websites, so your first priority before creating your Google Place listing is to visit OTHER listing sites and create your business listing there. Sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, Insider Pages, Sunshine Pages (for Louisiana folks), Yahoo Places, and the Yellow Pages all allow FREE listings of your business. You can also find paid business listing services that will do it for you for a small fee.

When listing on these sites, be sure to completely fill out each form. Enter your Hours of Operation (even if you don’t have any). Enter your company email address (even if you don’t usually give it out). THIS IS IMPORTANT: You must complete each listing in the exact same way. In other words, copy and paste is your friend. Don’t spell out “Street” in one listing and spell it “St.” in another because your hand got tired. Why is this so important? Google looks for exact matches between listing to verify the data is accurate. Don’t throw Google for a loop. Help them help you and make sure everything matches exactly.

Google also considers sites like the Chamber of Commerce, Association Membership listings, facebook places, and foursquare. These sites are considered to be highly trustworthy, so visit each site directly to confirm your listing matches exactly to your listings on the sites mentioned earlier. If anything is incorrect, contact the site owner and follow the procedure they require to have your listing changed. It’s your info. Confirm that it is correct.

Your Website SEO

Meta Data is the data that each webpage holds about the page to make it easy for Search Engines to identify what’s on the page quickly. If your site was built by a web designer who understands the importance of Meta Data and how it relates to Search Engines, they would have requested that you provide information such as Keywords, Short Descriptions of your company (or of the information on each page), and webpage titles. Some designers prefer to create this information themselves.

To check your website pages’ meta data, visit your website, click the menu item “View” (in internet explorer), and choose “Source”. This will display the text that lives behind your webpage. Toward the top, you should see “META” tags. Look for Meta Keywords, Meta Title, and Meta Description. The information listed behind each of these tags should relate to the webpage you are viewing. To connect this back to Google Places, you will want to make sure that your city is listed somewhere in here. Google will bounce your website off of your Google Places listing to determine its relevance. You want it to be relevant.

Links from other websites (called backlinks) also help your Google Places listing to climb the list toward the top. You should have some sort of SEO work happening for your site already.  Just make sure that the keywords you are using also have your City, State, Company Name, etc. to be relevant to your Google Places listing.

Internal links around your site are links from one page to another within your site. Having a link from your Contact Us page to your FAQ page is an example of a internal link. Be sure, just as with external links, that your internal links also have keywords pertaining to your address and business name in them as well. Google does not place as much weight on internal links as external links, but they don’t hurt you either.

Stay Tuned for Part 2 where we will discuss your actual Google Places listing.  Now go create your “other than Google Places” listings.

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