After our initial website optimization is finished, we always send an email to our clients with details of what we have done on their behalf and provide them with important tools, in the form of documents, that can help them further their online marketing efforts in-house.
After we have submitted the business to Google+ Business Pages, Bing Places and Yahoo! Local, each of them will send a physical postcard to the business location that has a PIN. We request the business email us with each PIN so that we can verify the business with the search engines. Businesses should expect the PIN’s over a 2-3 week period. Most of the other websites where we submit businesses need no further action after our original submission.
One of the things we tell all of our clients is to make sure that they try as hard as they can to get reviews of their business. Reviews are one of the most important and relatively easy ways to improve their ranking. Here are some of the best places to ask clients to provide a review for you:
• Google+ Business Pages
• Yelp
• Foursquare
• Angie’s List
• Merchant Circle
Both Google+ and Yelp will provide you with the highest possibility of improving ranking, but some people use the other services as well and they may feel more comfortable going to them.
Two other important ranking factors are back links and citations. Back links are links to your website from another website. More authoritative websites and how they relate to you business are factors in your ranking. Citations are similar, but there usually is no linking involved. most citations come from directory type websites. As with links, citations from a more authoritative site are ranking factors.
Next are the documents we send via email after completing our work.
The first document is called “active-potential citations.pdf”, in it, clients will see three major areas. The first displays the top 10 directories as well as additional directories that the business could be listed in and whether or not they are listed. The second is for “Active Citations” and this shows the websites that currently have an active business listing. Clients can click on “View Citation” to be taken to the website’s listing to review it for accuracy. The third one is “Potential Citations”. Clients see 5 columns which are their industry competitors and where each are listed. Clicking on “Get Citation” will take them to a listing location where they can add their own business to that website.
The next document is called ”keyword-analysis.pdf” and it is just a listing of the most popular terms that have been searched for on Google in the last year on average based upon the business model of the client. This will help them as they add their business to other citation sites by showing them that some wording for a product or service has more searches then related words or phrases. This document is also very helpful when new website pages or sections are created in the future.
Next is “local-directory-checklist.pdf” This document starts out with helpful information on how to best submit a business to important citation websites. Following this is a list of industry specific websites where they may find additional places to list their company. Next are some tips to help them create more links to their website. More links mean better rankings in the long run.
Finally, our clients will see “Submissions.rtf” which is a listing of all of the places we submitted their site to or corrected their business entry.
Questions? Email Marc Harris, Partner at Net101.com
