A solid listing on Google Places can certainly go a long way in establishing your business as a leader in its niche in a particular location.
Getting that solid listing, however, isn’t as easy as one might think. An article posted on LocalVisibilitySystem, however, has outlined a 12-week action plan to improve Google Places visibility of any business that could prove to be very useful. Let me summarise the steps for you.
Steps to improve Google Places Visibility
To improve Google Places visibility, you should immediately focus on making sure that all information on your Google Places page is accurate right from the get-go. This, as well as claiming your page so any edits you make would be retained, must be done ASAP. Performing basic optimization and removing any duplicate listings for your business is also advisable. Tuning up your website by, among other things, optimising your title tag and adding a footer that bears your business details on each site page is also recommended for the first week, as well on the fifth and ninth weeks.
Prioritise directory listing
Another task that must be done on the first week is making submissions to data providers. It’s absolutely important to do directory listing at the very beginning because it takes data providers such as LocalEze and ExpressUpdateUSA about two months to feed your business details to Google Places and third party sites such as SuperPages and CitySearch. Getting on many a directory listing is also a task you need to do right on the first week and in the next eleven weeks. The more citations you get, the better, regardless of whether they’re a directory listing from the most important sites or from ones no one has ever heard about.
The first week should also be spent on checking data you have entered in data providers and directory sites and fixing them in case there are errors or inaccuracies. Doing the same thing on week 5 and week 9 is also recommended.
Ask for 3rd party customer reviews
On the second week right up to the 12th week, you should be actively requesting 3rd party customer reviews about your business on non-Google sites. Getting these 3rd party customer reviews from sites like InsiderPages, CitySearch doesn’t just get the attention of those particular sites’ users. These 3rd party customer reviews can also help your ranking in Google Places.
By the third week and in the next nine weeks, ask customers to post reviews right there on your Google Places page. However, it’s important that you have already claimed your page before asking for reviews. If you still haven’t claimed your page, there could still be duplicates where customers could post their reviews, which, in turn, may just be arbitrarily deleted by Google.
Read the original article here for more.