Looking to get your business to rank number one in the Google Maps section? I’m going to show you how in today’s video blog.

Hi there internet fans, Ryan Perry here. And today I want to show you how to get your business in the Google My Business section. That’s the Map section that pops up at the top for local search. This is really important for local businesses to increase visibility. In order to show you, we’re going to have to jump on the computer, so let’s go ahead and do that now. Local based business looking to be found by local clients need to be in the Google My Business. That’s how you get in this map section here when you do a Google search result. Why is this important? Well, for a couple of different reasons. Number one, it’s actually above organic search. All this text down here, all this clickety click stuff down here, is organic. On top is the local search. This is Google My Business. The other reason why it’s really important is that from a smart phone user, again this is going to be at top, but look what I can do. I can click and get a phone number. I can call your business right away, I can view your website if I want to or I can get directions to your website and I can get reviews. This is all in one place on my smart phone versus having to go click, bounce around the website, try and find the information that I want. A lot of that information that people want about a local based business is going to show up here.

Now, if you are in a larger city, San Francisco, LA, Dallas, Texas, as an example, you do a search, you may see this Google Guaranteed on all three of the listings. What does that mean? Well, essentially, Google, a couple of years ago, started testing pay to find, which essentially means you need to pay… All these people here, this is paid advertising. They are actually paying to be here. We’re not seeing that in the smaller cities right now, however, in larger metropolitan areas, we are. Will it roll out across the United States? More than likely yes. When? We don’t know but for right now, if you want to get all this organic traffic, you want to be found.

What is Google looking for? Well, there’s a couple of things. One, you need to actually have a Google My Business account. This is where all this information is coming from. Number two, getting reviews on your website is really important, not reviews on your website but about your business, I should say, are really important. It’s part of the ranking factor in how you show up. You need to actually be in the city. So, if you do not have a physical address in the city, you’re not going to show up. As an example, Rohnert Park is a smaller city, one of the next cities north of me is Santa Rosa, much larger. I would love to show up in there. Yes, I can but it would take a lot more work because I don’t have a physical address in Santa Rosa. Then, what I really want to talk about in this video is going to be citations. Essentially, Google is looking at your business name, your phone number, your address, your URL, your hours of operation, all this information and they want to make sure that it’s consistent across multiple search directories.

Search directories are Yelp, CitySearch, there’s a number of other ones: Yp.com. Then also looking at social media accounts: Your Google My Business, Facebook, Twitter. Is all the information that’s listed relevant? Well, how do we find out? Well, there’s a great tool by Moz called Moz Local. All you need to do is go to moz.com/local. That’ll bring you to this page, where all you need to do is type in your business name, your zip code, and check My Business Listing. What they’re doing is they’re going out, checking your business name against their database to see what’s going on. In my case, I’ve already done this so my account is verified. If you don’t have a verification check mark, that’s okay. Then, all you need to do is click ‘Simple Biz Support’ and it is going to give you some of the major listings and let you know how your business evaluates, essentially. Is the phone numbers the same, the address the same, and in my case, I still have some clean up that I need to do. I moved physical locations from Santa Rosa to Rohnert Park a couple of years ago and I’ve been working and working and working in order to get this cleaned up.

Now, what’s really nice about Moz Local is you got a couple of different options here. One is, I can go through and click on either all of these essentially and any of them that are not 100% or are missing completely, is I can click on it and it’s going to take me to a page that’s going to show me what’s going on and I can start cleaning this stuff up by clicking ‘Update Listing’. The other thing that you can do is just go to Moz Local and they will actually take care of this for you automatically. They have accounts that start out at less than $9 a month per listing at this time. All you need to do is fill out some information, choose your package, you go through billing and they have a way of taking your database, whatever you put in in this section and pushing it out to all the search directories. What is that going to do for you? Again, it’s going to help clean up, and make sure all this information is consistent. Google loves consistency. It does not like it when you say, “Oh my website is this, but over here it’s something else, in one database this is my phone number, but in a different database it’s another phone number”.

I’ve gone through all of this which is why I’m still struggling with mine. Not only have I changed my phone number but I’ve also changed my listing. Which brings up an important tip, if you are a business that has moved at all you definitely want to go to Moz Local and fill out your business name, address, check the business listings. When you get this all cleaned up this will help with your ranking. Now does that guarantee ranking by doing this? No it does not, there are a couple of other things that come into play here. One is how many businesses are you competing against? If you’re only competing against three other businesses, well your chances of being on one of the three out of the four listed are going to be much better than if there’s 50 businesses all competing for these three spots. The other thing that’s really going to make an impact, is legitimate reviews. Reviews on Google Plus… Google My Business excuse me, and on Yelp and other large social media channels such as Facebook.

I highly recommend running your business through Moz Local now, you might be surprised what you find out, and if you’re using an SEO company I would definitely run it through Moz to make sure that they’re aware of what your local search looks like. Just so you know don’t expect 100% out of Moz, I have yet to see that. If you’re doing over say 80% accuracy I would say you’re doing very good, and speaking of accuracy, feel free to subscribe to the channel by clicking the subscribe button here. Or check out one of our other videos here or here. We’d love to hear your feedback also, I should say I would love to hear your feedback also, if you leave a comment below. Thumbs up or thumbs down also appreciated. Take care everybody.