Small business should be listed on Google Places

In spite of the slight confusion and frustration involved with getting listed on Google Places, it is of benefit to any small business. The results are often both immediate and astonishing.

Only yesterday, one of our clients exclaimed during a follow-up call that persuading her to set up her Google accounts and profiles was more than worth the 30 minutes or so it took.

This is our advice to you today:

  1. If you haven’t already, set up you Gmail Account and fill out your profile, remembering to add all your social media profile links, blogs and websites that you own or contribute to.
  2. Set up your Google+ Account. Fill in any other information for your profile, add some friends and all your clients, peers, colleagues to relevantly titled circles. You might also want to follow some relevant companies for your industry and interests.
  3. Go to your Google+ account and Click  Pages under  More on the left, pick the local business category and follow the steps, filling in as much information as possible.

Once all that is done, you can start to post your blog posts to your business page on Google+. You’ll find that the indexing of your posts, your reach and your rankings will improve. Next time, we’ll cover how to make sure that you’re getting authorship and publisher benefit for all the content that you create across the web.

Feel free to circle me on Google+ and follow Avidmode, I’ll circle you back and answer any questions that you have about the process. Happy Googling!

6 Comments

  1. Raymond on 25 February 2013 at 5:16 pm

    Thank you for the article, I wanted to ask is it possible to just set up client pages in your own Google + if they don’t or can’t be bothered ?

    Thank you

    • Kittie Walker on 25 February 2013 at 5:55 pm

      You can indeed set up clients in this way. It makes things easier to manage for you and you can always transfer the page to the business owner at a later date, but I’d have reservations doing it that way. I always set up a clients profile separately from mine. Then they get the benefit of not only being a “publisher” in Google’s eyes, but then you can verify them for “authorship” purposes too. I always build out a full Google profile for my clients with webmaster tools, google analytics, adsense, adwords, g+, g+ pages and places/local pages all running off that profile. I just add Indigo Girl as an administrator so that I can service them from my accounts as needed.

    • David Orman on 7 April 2013 at 3:36 pm

      You consistently provide the most useful and thought provoking information for small businesses on the Internet. Thank you very much.

      • Kittie Walker on 7 April 2013 at 5:16 pm

        Thanks, David! I appreciate your kind words and your stopping by to comment. Looking forward to taking it up a notch when our new website is launched in early May!

  2. Raymond on 25 February 2013 at 8:07 pm

    Thank you for the reply, I am dealing with some clients that think Google + is not worth the effort, so that is why I was asking, they don’t want to spend one second on creating the page.

    • Kittie Walker on 25 February 2013 at 9:06 pm

      Well the benefits are pretty immediate from an indexing and sometimes from a ranking perspective. Most of my clients are as reticent as your client is. They don’t need to use it actively if they don’t want to, but setting the presence up is important. If they or you use Hootsuite to manage their social media you can post their blog RSS feed directly to their G+ page. It can be pretty much lock and leave once set up.

      I’d be interested to know how you get on with it… and which approach you decide to take.

Leave a Comment