How Miami businesses can utilise Google Maps
When Miami businesses are designing their strategy, they mustn’t overlook the importance that Google maps has to play in this.
Maps are more than just a way for people to locate your business, they're also a highly effective marketing tool that you can easily utilise if you take a few simple steps.
Maps is a powerful tool
If you are operating a business in Miami mostly reliant on local traffic, it can be tempting to think that you don’t need a web strategy. However, done right, a web strategy including Google maps will help you exponentially boost your business by helping people find you and crucially by letting them know that you are a legitimate business and that you can trust them.
Crucially, Google maps also lets people easily see reviews of your business. Around 97% of people read online reviews in order to judge a local business before they ever set foot through the door.
If you want your business to rank highly on Google maps, the three main things you should be paying attention to are:
- Ensuring that your listing is complete.
- Making sure that your business is linked from other high-quality sites.
- Getting your customers to leave you good reviews.
Complete your listing
The first thing you’ll need to do to make sure you get seen on Google maps is to complete your listing.
Once you have a listing, it’s really important that you ensure that you complete it. This means including:
- Photos - include as many photos as possible. Professional photos are great, but it’s also a good idea to include photos that have been taken on a mobile device as people will perceive these as being more authentic and less likely to have been staged.
- Business name
- Address
- Phone number
- Website
According to Google, 70% of users perceive businesses with a complete listing to be more trustworthy than those whose listings are incomplete, so this really is worth doing well.
High-quality inbound links
Once you have a listing, you’ll want to ensure that your business is mentioned on the websites of other trusted Miami businesses.
One way to do this is through networking with local bloggers. Reach out to bloggers and influencers who are well known in your area and in your niche to get them to backlink to your company website from their blogs. This will improve your domain authority (DA) and help to improve your listing ranking. It’s important that you only work with trusted bloggers, as having your site linked from untrusted sources can actually damage your SEO ranking. Check out www.clickintelligence.co for more detail on how to implement an effective SEO strategy.
Good reviews
The more reviews you have on your business profile, the higher up the rankings it will get. It’s definitely worth encouraging your customers to leave reviews for this reason, and also because it means when people view your page, they will have a good idea of what your customers really think of you. Provided the reviews are positive, this will make you appear much more trustworthy.
