#ecommerce courier franchise

[myacecourierservices]

Looking for the Top Courier Services in India?

My Ace Courier and Services provides the courier service in India, providing quick and reliable delivery solutions nationwide. With a trustworthy team and advanced logistics, we prioritize efficiency and customer satisfaction. Experience seamless shipping with MyAce - your trusted partner for all your courier needs across India.

[couriermitra]

Courier Aggregator Software is an online software tool that enables eCommerce stores to manage their courier delivery for multiple courier companies. This software for retail, small & medium companies offers the customers an opportunity to choose from multiple couriers, and also it provides the facility of consolidating all orders from various warehouses into one single platform.

[nimbuspost1w3]

Top Courier Delivery Services in India

Professional pick-up and delivery services make it possible to transport cargo from one area to another. Several courier services in India transport packages around the country. Finding the best courier company to ship your goods is tough. So, if you’re looking for the best courier services in India, you’ve come to the right place.

The Best Courier Delivery Services Near Me

1. Delhivery Courier Service Delhivery provides international and domestic services, with over 17000 pin codes and 93 fulfilment centres. It is praised for the quickness with which it provides COD (cash-on-delivery) and reverses logistics services.

2. DTDC Courier Service They operate in 240 countries and have 11,000+ franchises worldwide. Besides, it covers 12,000+ Indian pin codes. Real-time tracking, automatic reporting, and web data availability for customer reference enhance DTDC operations.

3. Gati Gati has maintained a strong position in order fulfilment. Besides, it offers eCommerce firms various distribution alternatives and delivered services. It offers speedy delivery, transportation methods, and warehousing solutions.

4. XpressBees

XpressBees is trusted by many eCom businesses to dispatch their products at the lowest workable cost. The company offers rapid and cheap last-mile logistical services in 8500 Indian pin codes along with next-day and same-day delivery alongside reverse collection services.

5. Ecom Express

Ecom Express covers 27000+ pin codes in India. Ecom Quick also provides express delivery and QC (quality checks) on returned products at the doorstep. It promises that all deliveries will be completed within three days.

6. Safexpress Shipping Service Safexpress offers services across 28000+ different pin codes. In addition, each truck is outfitted with PRS-enabled smart devices, letting customers follow their orders in real-time while they are en route.

7. NimbusPost NimbusPost provides an excellent supply chain management, order screening, and AI logistics fraud detection. Serving across 29000+ pin codes within India via 27+ courier options, the logistics partner guarantees quick and effective distribution.

Which is Better? We’ve examined the finest providers of courier services in India with whom you may work. The listed companies have worked in logistics for a long time and have a solid reputation for offering high-quality logistics services throughout India. These courier service companies have helped hundreds of medium and small businesses fulfil their clients’ deadlines for eCommerce deliveries.

LEARN MORE.....

[kabirpatel2021]

[abhijitroy11]

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[samparkindialogistics]

Top 10 Best Courier and Logistics Companies in India

Finding courier and logistics companies in India in the business world is hard. There are lots of companies but only a handful will provide value. Working with a reliable courier and logistics service ensures that your client’s shipment arrives on time and without damage. Not only that, but you’ll also have an opportunity to develop long-term business relationships with clients and can improve the customer experience.

When it comes to growing a startup, you would soon be realizing that logistics and courier services in India can prove to be a challenging affair. It takes a lot of hard work to find the right solution for your growing business. You need to find companies that have adequate infrastructure, state-of-the-art facilities, and offer services with minimal delays. It is not fun or fair when your shipment suffers from delays due to some fault in the service provider.

With India being one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, it's no wonder that our courier & logistics industry is booming! India is also home to some of the biggest courier and logistic companies in Asia. Numerous courier and logistics companies operate in India, but the list below lists the top 10 courier and logistics companies in India that have been reviewed and researched thoroughly before putting together the list.

List of Top 10 Best Courier & Logistics Companies in India

1. Sampark India Logistics

Founded in 2012, Sampark India Logistics is an end-to-end courier and logistics Service Provider in India. It offers effective solutions to various freight complexities for its valuable customers. They offer Air Freight Services, Land Freight, Sea Freight Services, Rail Freight, and Third-Party Logistics & Warehouse Services. With a strong pan-India network, they serve over more than 40,000 Pin codes. They have a support staff that provides live assistance to customers 24/7/365 with a single point of contact to assist them. Through reliability, a team of experts, cutting-edge technology, the latest equipment, and tracking solutions, they offer comprehensive Supply Chain and Logistics solutions. They are mostly known for their Hub and Spoke model. Some other services provided by Sampark India Logistics are Cargo Charter Services, Quicker Smarter Services, Reverse Logistics, and many more.

2. FedEx

In India, FedEx is a well-known name in the logistics sector. It has initially created a reputation for itself in the worldwide logistics sector before coming to India to give excellent shipping solutions to online businesses. For numerous decades, it has been the chosen method of express delivery. FedEx also offers shipping services to small companies and online retailers. It can handle a wide range of products, including heavyweight goods, fragile items, high-value items, and hazardous commodities such as lithium batteries and dry ice. They have a specialized department that addresses all of your concerns. You can select from a number of services, such as FedEx priority, FedEx standard, FedEx economy, and special delivery needs, among others.

3. Delhivery

Since its establishment in 2011, Delhivery has climbed to the top of the e-commerce courier services provider company rankings. Delhivery has approximately 10,000 clients in India, with 3/4th of them being large eCommerce companies. This is due to the company's exceptional service offerings. They are one of the top supply chain services companies in India that provide technological infrastructure and logistics for the eCommerce industry serving over 2,500 cities across the country. It is frequently praised for its effective reverse logistics and COD services. Its main focus is on providing numerous rapid delivery choices, such as on-demand delivery, same-day delivery, and next-day delivery.

4. DTDC

DTDC was established in 1990 and is located in Bangalore, India. They have more than 11,000 franchise locations throughout the world and provide services in 240 countries. DTDC is one of India's best delivery businesses, covering over 12,000 pin codes. In addition to services like COD, collect-on-delivery, bulk shipping, heavyweight shipping, and expedited delivery, DTDC provides eCommerce firms with the option of personalizing deliveries based on client preferences. End-to-end tracking, data availability on the web for customer reference, and automated reporting enhance DTDC operations, allowing the organization to efficiently handle the massive volume of shipments.

5. Gati

GATI was founded in 1989 to improve delivery for stores and now for eCommerce. It is an eCommerce shipping firm that offers end-to-end logistics solutions for all of your eCommerce fulfillment requirements. It presently services over 19,000 pin codes across the country, covering almost 99.5% of Indian districts. It provides a wide range of distribution choices for eCommerce businesses, including expedited delivery, transportation methods, and warehouse solutions. It also has a lot of expertise with COD orders and offers customized warehouse pick-up. They work with a variety of businesses, including B2B, B2C, and C2C.

6. DHL

Another prominent international courier service for eCommerce in India is DHL. Its internationally controlled and well-connected network of distribution centers enables it to effectively execute supply chain solutions to increase order fulfillment both inside the country and throughout the globe's 220+ countries. It serves over 26,000 pin codes across the country. Freight forwarding, FTL shipping, storage, and distribution, as well as other supply chain services, are among the company's specialties. DHL especially focuses on decreasing wastage in the delivery process and cutting each company's environmental footprint.

7. Blue Dart

Blue Dart is a well-known name in the global logistics industry. Since 1983, it has been one of the best eCommerce courier services. They are well-known for their rapid air delivery services, which they supply to over 35,000+ pin codes in India and 220+ countries internationally.  They have the largest logistics network in the world and offer a variety of distribution services, including air express, freight forwarding, supply chain solutions, and customs clearing. They've used cutting-edge technologies to improve supply chain management for eCommerce companies. They have a variety of web-based and standalone products, as well as a firm that wants to make your eCommerce shipping more advanced and faster.

8. Safexpress

Safexpress is one of India's oldest courier and logistics companies, having served the eCommerce logistics business for over 20 years. Safexpress takes pride in offering businesses the most effective supply chain solutions in India, serving over more than 28,000 pin codes. It connects each vehicle with PRS-enabled smart devices, allowing eCommerce businesses to receive real-time tracking information as orders are being delivered. This also allows transportation units to find the best path for every delivery in order to minimize delays. Its secure delivery services, which include receipt of proof-of-delivery on fulfillment, provide an extra benefit to online enterprises.

9. Ecom Express

Ecom Express is one of India's leading eCommerce courier services. Ecom Express, which covers over 27,000 pin codes across India, is a popular choice for e-commerce firms that handle high-value products like jewels since it provides extra security and monitoring services during storage and transportation. It also offers express delivery, fulfillment services, digital services, doorstep quality checks (QC) for returned products, and delivery and returns within 72 hours. Currently, they offer complete coverage in 20 Indian states.

10. Ekart Logistics

Ekart Logistics is one of India's most well-known courier and logistics companies, offering complete supply chain and fulfillment services. Flipkart's in-house logistics branch, Ekart Logistics, was founded in 2009. It now delivers over 3,800 pin codes across India with first-mile and last-mile delivery services. The Ekart Logistics API enables e-commerce enterprises to connect with a variety of online marketplaces and storefronts, as well as give customers a variety of payment options such as Cash-on-Delivery (COD), UPI, wallets, and net banking. The Ekart tracking API allows for simple order tracking data transfer across systems and offers clients with real-time order progress updates.

[vlesociety]

Shadowfax Delivery Partner Registration CSC Ecommerce amazon ,flipkart

Shadowfax Delivery Partner Registration CSC Ecommerce amazon ,flipkart

Shadowfax Delivery Partner Registration

Shadowfax Delivery Partner Registration CSC Ecommerce Amazon ,Flipkart

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यह भी पढ़े: Delhivery Product Delivery Franchise Registration Process

Shadowfax Partner…

[myacecourierservices]

Understanding fast, reliable deliveries with MyAce Courier and Services Pvt. Ltd, renowned as the best courier service in India. Our extensive network ensures timely and secure transportation of your parcels nationwide. Trust us for unparalleled efficiency and customer satisfaction. Choose MyAce for all your courier needs and enjoy seamless delivery solutions.

[couriermitra]

Best Multi Carrier Shipping Software for Small/Medium Business

Every eCommerce company begins small, but by the end of the year, it will require at least two carrier partners to handle the order fulfillment. Managing several carriers, on the other hand, is a job in and of itself, requiring the assistance of a Multi Carrier Shipping Software. With over 100 million people converting to online shopping, the market is inundated with growth and expansion potential. Growth, on the other hand, has a cost. Maintaining and managing your relationships with international and regional carriers is part of the cost of completing 2,000, 10,000, or 20,000+ orders each month.

E-commerce enterprises can use Multi Carrier Shipping Software to organize and perform a wide range of shipping activities. To enable order creation, track orders, handle NDRs, optimize returns, and perform a number of other duties, they use a variety of tech-enabled shipping solutions such as AI-driven engines and eCommerce Shipping API connections. Each multi-carrier shipping system, on the other hand, has its own set of specialized services and operational benefits.

 What is Multi Carrier Shipping Software?

Multi carrier shipping software is a solution specifically designed to reduce the intricacies of the parcel shipping process, which primarily deals with freight shipment monitoring. It unifies your network of contracted carriers into a single, user-friendly platform, allowing your company to save money by rate shopping for the lowest shipping choice among your contracted while still satisfying consumer expectations for timely deliveries, carrier services are provided. But the benefits don't end there. With a multi-carrier shipping software, you can manage label printing, track package movements, track orders to the place of delivery, and streamline logistics operations across many carriers, all while maintaining carrier compliance. Business intelligence also offers you with useful information and helps you identify continuing cost-cutting opportunities.

 The Benefits of Multi Carrier Shipping Software

Whether sending large or small parcel volumes, multi-carrier shipping software provides various answers to the issues that organizations encounter. These advantages include:

·         You can easily track all of your orders, whether you're using a single shipping carrier or several, to ensure client satisfaction.

·         The lowering of carrier expenses is one of the most appealing aspects of switching to a multi-carrier shipping software. Once again, the software will compare shipping costs and offer the best deals. Most eCommerce businesses that have made the switch report that foregoing carrier-supplied platforms saved them on shipping expenses.

·         You can choose the fastest, most cost-effective shipping option for your business and clients by comparing contracted carrier prices.

·         Multi-carrier shipping software integrates seamlessly with your current supply chain, e-commerce software, and other business tools.

·         If shipping rates aren't as important to you, you might evaluate delivery times from different carriers to ensure the product arrives by a certain date.

  Using Multiple Carriers, You May Streamline the Shipment Process

While any shipper's ultimate goal is to deliver products to customers without damage, at the lowest possible cost, and in the quickest possible time, the recent surge in e-commerce business has increased customers' ability to customize their shipping options, and businesses must be able to accommodate this delivery personalization.

Courier Mitra is a comprehensive cloud-based software platform developed by a professional and well-known company in the courier and logistics sector. This satisfies your Franchise courier business's end-to-end requirements. This software optimizes every step of the distribution process with a complete set of features designed specifically for the needs of operations, dispatching, shippers and drivers.                                              

 Why it is so Important?

Clients all across the world are becoming more interested in Multi Carrier Shipping Software. Business owners and entrepreneurs have recently been pushed to build new and enhanced marketing approaches in order to provide the greatest accessible methods. Clients anticipate prompt delivery, and if you can match that expectation, you may gain some repeat business. Organizations that are striving to improve their entire operations should figure out how to do it.

A decent Multi Carrier Shipping Solution may assist a company in reintegrating its normal operations, improving the customer experience, and reducing unnecessary procedures while functioning fast and efficiently. It's crucial to keep excellent relationships with delivery drivers, consumers, and business owners. This helps the company grow and expand while also providing customers with the best shipping experience possible.

Are you ready to start streamlining your parcel delivery process? To learn more, contact a Courier Mitra professional.

[wendyjudithqe]

Ranking your local business part 2: Google My Business

This is the second post in an 8-part series on how to rank your business for local searches at Google. Google My Business (GMB) is a free product that allows business owners to verify and submit basic details about their business to Google. Owners can also engage with existing and potential customers across Google’s properties.

Eligibility for Google My Business

Verifying your location

Primary Business Information

Secondary Business Information

Ranking factors beyond your control

Google My Business Insights

Troubleshooting GMB Listing Issues

The future of Google My Business

Summary

Make sure your customers find your shop! Optimize your site with our Local SEO plugin and show your opening hours, locations, map and much more! »

Buy now » Info

After starting its life as a rudimentary web form called the Local Business Center, Google My Business has matured into a highly sophisticated product over the last decade. In the last couple of years, GMB received many improvements. GMB is an essential part of a well-thought-out local SEO strategy.

GMB offers highly-rated companion apps on both the App Store and Google Play. It also provides metrics about the visibility and engagement with your business that no other product does (including Google Analytics).

Eligibility for Google My Business

Any business with a bonafide brick-and-mortar location is eligible for a Google My Business listing at that location. For businesses with two or more locations, each location would be eligible for a distinct GMB listing.

A common question I get from business owners at conferences is:

“I operate my business out of my house and I don’t want people to know my address–what do I do?”

Well, if you don’t operate a walk-up brick-and-mortar location, but visit your customers in a particular geographic area, you’re what’s called a “Service Area Business.” Examples of Service Area Businesses are plumbers, carpet cleaners, and courier services. In this case, you’re still eligible for a listing. However, you’ll want to choose “Yes” when Google asks if you deliver goods and services to customers at their location.

Just because you serve customers in a given market does not mean you’re eligible for a Google My Business listing in that market. For example, an eCommerce company based in Chicago would not be eligible for a GMB listing in Dallas just because they had customers in Dallas.

Verifying your location

Google tries to make sure that only legitimate businesses are represented in GMB. It requires anyone who attempts to claim a Listing verify their association with the business in some way.

The easiest way to start the process is to perform a desktop search at Google for your business name (for example, “Pacific Seafood Portland”). In the panel on the right-hand side of the page, you’ll see a link that poses the question “Own this business?” Importantly–before you click that link to begin the verification process–make sure you are either not signed in to Google (you can create an account in the next step), or are signed into a Google account for your business as opposed to your personal Gmail.

It’s not a GMB requirement, though; however, it’ll be much easier to share access to your listing with employees or other agents of your company from a business account.

Once you fill out the most basic information (see below for what these details are), if it can corroborate your address and phone number, Google will call and ask you to enter a PIN number on screen. If it hasn’t previously seen a business with the phone number and address you submitted, you’ll be mailed a postcard within a week with instructions for how to PIN verify.

Primary Business Information Name, Address and Phone

This sounds simple, but it’s surprising how many business owners overthink these core attributes or try to “optimize” them.

Your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) are your basic thumbprint online. If they don’t reflect your business accurately at Google My Business, Google (and your customers) lose trust that you are who you say you are. They will stop sending business your way.

Do NOT stuff keywords in your business name. Represent yourself as you would answer the phone or welcome a customer into your store. You probably see spammers doing this and succeeding all the time, but at some point, it’ll come back to bite them. Google is monitoring for these kinds of abuses all the time and getting better at blacklisting the abusers.

Submit the same address you use on your website. (If you’re a Yoast user, this should be the address you enter in the Yoast Local SEO plugin.) Even if you’re a service-area business, you’ll have to submit a physical address and not a PO box or other mailing-only address.

You’ll see a map displayed just alongside your address. Zoom in and double-check that the pin is in the correct place on your business. Google’s pin precision for U.S. addresses is typically pretty good, but it can be spotty in other countries.

Don’t use a tracking phone number to segment customers coming from Google vs. other sources. There are ways to do this, but they’re pretty advanced. Implementing tracking numbers incorrectly can do tremendous damage to your local search rankings.

Category

From a rankings standpoint, the category field is the most important attribute you can optimize at Google My Business. In my experience, it’s best not to listen to Google’s advice on categories on this one, particularly since that advice has changed so frequently over the years.

Google maintains a taxonomy of several thousand categories to describe local businesses. By typing in a few characters of a keyword that describes your business, you’ll probably find a match pretty closely.

Google suggests “using as few categories as possible,” as well as categories that are “as specific as possible.”  And while it’s true that Google can and does “detect category information from your website and from mentions about your business throughout the web,” my advice is to explicitly specify as many relevant categories as you can on your Google My Business listing.

If you operate a small restaurant that’s open from 7 am – 3 pm, select “Breakfast Restaurant,” “Brunch Restaurant,” “Lunch Restaurant,” “Restaurant,” “Cafe,” “Coffee Shop,” and any other relevant category. Take the time to enter multiple keywords that describe your business and see which categories match. Use all of them that are relevant.

Google’s automated review system may remove one or two from your listing, but this is not spam–provided you select relevant categories–. It helps you show up for as broad a range of searches as possible.

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Buy now » Info Website

Google calls this field “website,” but it doesn’t have to be your “website” per se. In particular, if you operate more than one location, you may want to enter the page on your website that corresponds to the location you’re submitting to Google (rather than your homepage). Opinions are mixed as to whether listing your homepage or a location page will help you rank better, so do what’s best for prospective customers. If you think your homepage will give them the best initial sense of your business, then submit that as your “website.” If a location page (or even some other page) will give them a better sense, submit that instead.

Secondary Business Information

After entering the attributes above, you’re asked to verify your listing. But don’t stop there. There are a few other attributes that are well worth your time to add.

Photos and Images

Photos may be the most neglected attribute in all of local search. The success of Instagram, Pinterest, and any number of lesser-known apps indicates just how visual our internet culture has become. Consumers often select (or reject) a business because of its photos. Not only on the content of the photos but their quality and professionalism.

Photos are especially important in the mobile ecosystem that Google My Business powers (including Google Maps), where they are the dominant representation of a business in Google’s card-focused user interface.

As with all local media or social media sites, Google My Business has its own image format requirements. Take some time to review them and make sure you have high-quality assets for each format.

Optimizing your photos also offers a great opportunity to engage your customers. At the very least place the ones you’re considering at your point of sale and ask them to choose which one they like better.  Or get even more creative and start a contest among your customers to show your business in its best light, with the winner–as voted on by other customers–receiving a cash prize or gift card.

Hours

Selecting your opening hours is pretty straightforward. Google has dramatically improved its interface for telling customers when you’re open over the past several years. Hours will be front-and-center wherever customers interact with your business on Google so they should definitely be accurate.

You can now even daypart multiple times during the day, and add specific hours for holidays and special events.

While you can’t control it, you may be interested to know that Google now displays the busy-ness of your business in real-time. This is based on aggregate location-tracking of visitors with Android phones and iOS Google Maps users with location services enabled.

Menu URLs

Certain categories of businesses will have the option to add a link to a menu.  If you’re lucky enough to be in one of these categories, I highly recommend adding this link, as it gives Google an additional set of keywords that your business for which should be considered relevant.

Advanced Information

These are low priority fields. All three are geared primarily towards large multi-location businesses and franchises.

Ranking factors beyond your control

Two significant ranking factors over which you have little control have to do with the physical location of your business.

The first is the proximity of your business to the location where your prospective customer is performing her search. All other things being equal, Google will choose to display a business closer to the searcher than one farther away from her.

In the early years of Google, its algorithm favored businesses which were close to the center of a given city or its “centroid.” Google simply wasn’t as good at detecting the location of the searcher. It defaulted to showing businesses in the areas of highest population density.

This factor has declined in importance, especially for mobile searches where Google has a precise idea of where you are. Google has also gotten better and better at detecting the location information of desktop searchers, partially through surreptitious means of collection.

The second factor is having an address in the city in which your customer is searching.  If your customer is searching in Seattle, your Tacoma or Bellevue-based coffee shop won’t appear, simply because it’s not relevant for that search.

Short of opening additional locations to target areas where high concentrations of your customers are searching, there’s not much you can do to optimize for these ranking factors, but you should be aware of their importance.

Google My Business Insights

Google provides a free, lightweight analytics package as part of GMB. This gives you a basic sense of how customers and potential customers are viewing and interacting with your listing.

Insights shows how many times your listing appears in plain old search vs. Google Maps. It also shows the number of clicks to your website, requests for driving directions, and phone calls.

There’s also a simple breakdown of how many customers see your listing for direct searches (for your business specifically) vs. discovery searches (for businesses in your category). While no one outside of Google is entirely sure how they calculate the discovery number, it’s probably as good a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO as any, particularly if you track it over time.

Unfortunately, this is harder than it should be, as GMB Insights are only visible as snapshots-in-time. Unless you remember to check them regularly and transfer them to a spreadsheet along with the date, it can be difficult to track your growth. Strangely, there’s no default longitudinal view built into the product.

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Buy now » Info Troubleshooting GMB Listing Issues

The most common GMB troubleshooting issue continues to be the existence of duplicate listings for the same business. While it’s gotten harder to detect duplicate listings, it’s much easier to close them. I’ll cover why duplicate listings are bad for your business in future installments of this series.

The first step to identifying duplicates is to search for your business name on maps.google.com. You’ll see a little more comprehensive list of potentially-matching results than Google is willing to present on Google.com.

If it looks like multiple listings refer to your business, select the one you’d like to report as a duplicate and click “Suggest an Edit.” On the following screen, slide the “Place is permanently closed or never existed” bar to “Yes,” and select the radio button next to duplicate.

Google support staff are generally responsive to these kinds of reports within a week.  If you continue to have trouble, ask multiple people–co-workers, friends, family members, or relatives–to report the same problem, and it’s more likely Google will look at it.

If your issue seems particularly thorny, you’re most likely to get a response by tweeting @googlemybiz, the official Twitter support channel for GMB. And if Google support just isn’t cutting it, Joy Hawkins, who just started her own company last year after years as the GMB expert at a large agency, is an invaluable resource for troubleshooting additional issues.

The future of Google My Business

At various times in its past, Google My Business has seemed like the hot potato no one wanted to wind up holding at Google Headquarters.

That no longer seems to be the case. GMB has become Google’s front-line defense against Facebook’s overwhelming mindshare among small business owners. The main product has become much more robust. Google has released two major sub-products within GMB–Messaging and Posts–just within the last couple of months.

The goal of both products seems to be to get small business owners to engage with their customers via GMB on a regular basis, as opposed to a “set it and forget it” basis.

We’re also starting to see a handful of third-party integrations that allow customers to book appointments or order products directly from the Google search result for select businesses.

While it’s too early to tell whether usage of any of these new features might benefit your rankings, it’s something that experts in the local search community will be following closely in the coming months.

Summary

Represent your Name, Address, and Phone exactly as they appear to customers in the real world. These are not attributes to optimize.

Pay special attention to categories and select as many categories as are relevant for your business.

Upload great photos of your business, and if you don’t have any, consider hiring a professional photographer to do so.

Take advantage of the relatively new option to add a menu URL if you’re in a relevant business category.

Consider using the Discovery metric from GMB Insights as a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO.

Pay attention to new engagement features from Google as they’re released.

Read more: ‘Ranking your local business at Google: Introduction’ »

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[mariathaterh]

Ranking your local business part 2: Google My Business

This is the second post in an 8-part series on how to rank your business for local searches at Google. Google My Business (GMB) is a free product that allows business owners to verify and submit basic details about their business to Google. Owners can also engage with existing and potential customers across Google’s properties.

Eligibility for Google My Business

Verifying your location

Primary Business Information

Secondary Business Information

Ranking factors beyond your control

Google My Business Insights

Troubleshooting GMB Listing Issues

The future of Google My Business

Summary

Make sure your customers find your shop! Optimize your site with our Local SEO plugin and show your opening hours, locations, map and much more! »

Buy now » Info

After starting its life as a rudimentary web form called the Local Business Center, Google My Business has matured into a highly sophisticated product over the last decade. In the last couple of years, GMB received many improvements. GMB is an essential part of a well-thought-out local SEO strategy.

GMB offers highly-rated companion apps on both the App Store and Google Play. It also provides metrics about the visibility and engagement with your business that no other product does (including Google Analytics).

Eligibility for Google My Business

Any business with a bonafide brick-and-mortar location is eligible for a Google My Business listing at that location. For businesses with two or more locations, each location would be eligible for a distinct GMB listing.

A common question I get from business owners at conferences is:

“I operate my business out of my house and I don’t want people to know my address–what do I do?”

Well, if you don’t operate a walk-up brick-and-mortar location, but visit your customers in a particular geographic area, you’re what’s called a “Service Area Business.” Examples of Service Area Businesses are plumbers, carpet cleaners, and courier services. In this case, you’re still eligible for a listing. However, you’ll want to choose “Yes” when Google asks if you deliver goods and services to customers at their location.

Just because you serve customers in a given market does not mean you’re eligible for a Google My Business listing in that market. For example, an eCommerce company based in Chicago would not be eligible for a GMB listing in Dallas just because they had customers in Dallas.

Verifying your location

Google tries to make sure that only legitimate businesses are represented in GMB. It requires anyone who attempts to claim a Listing verify their association with the business in some way.

The easiest way to start the process is to perform a desktop search at Google for your business name (for example, “Pacific Seafood Portland”). In the panel on the right-hand side of the page, you’ll see a link that poses the question “Own this business?” Importantly–before you click that link to begin the verification process–make sure you are either not signed in to Google (you can create an account in the next step), or are signed into a Google account for your business as opposed to your personal Gmail.

It’s not a GMB requirement, though; however, it’ll be much easier to share access to your listing with employees or other agents of your company from a business account.

Once you fill out the most basic information (see below for what these details are), if it can corroborate your address and phone number, Google will call and ask you to enter a PIN number on screen. If it hasn’t previously seen a business with the phone number and address you submitted, you’ll be mailed a postcard within a week with instructions for how to PIN verify.

Primary Business Information Name, Address and Phone

This sounds simple, but it’s surprising how many business owners overthink these core attributes or try to “optimize” them.

Your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) are your basic thumbprint online. If they don’t reflect your business accurately at Google My Business, Google (and your customers) lose trust that you are who you say you are. They will stop sending business your way.

Do NOT stuff keywords in your business name. Represent yourself as you would answer the phone or welcome a customer into your store. You probably see spammers doing this and succeeding all the time, but at some point, it’ll come back to bite them. Google is monitoring for these kinds of abuses all the time and getting better at blacklisting the abusers.

Submit the same address you use on your website. (If you’re a Yoast user, this should be the address you enter in the Yoast Local SEO plugin.) Even if you’re a service-area business, you’ll have to submit a physical address and not a PO box or other mailing-only address.

You’ll see a map displayed just alongside your address. Zoom in and double-check that the pin is in the correct place on your business. Google’s pin precision for U.S. addresses is typically pretty good, but it can be spotty in other countries.

Don’t use a tracking phone number to segment customers coming from Google vs. other sources. There are ways to do this, but they’re pretty advanced. Implementing tracking numbers incorrectly can do tremendous damage to your local search rankings.

Category

From a rankings standpoint, the category field is the most important attribute you can optimize at Google My Business. In my experience, it’s best not to listen to Google’s advice on categories on this one, particularly since that advice has changed so frequently over the years.

Google maintains a taxonomy of several thousand categories to describe local businesses. By typing in a few characters of a keyword that describes your business, you’ll probably find a match pretty closely.

Google suggests “using as few categories as possible,” as well as categories that are “as specific as possible.”  And while it’s true that Google can and does “detect category information from your website and from mentions about your business throughout the web,” my advice is to explicitly specify as many relevant categories as you can on your Google My Business listing.

If you operate a small restaurant that’s open from 7 am – 3 pm, select “Breakfast Restaurant,” “Brunch Restaurant,” “Lunch Restaurant,” “Restaurant,” “Cafe,” “Coffee Shop,” and any other relevant category. Take the time to enter multiple keywords that describe your business and see which categories match. Use all of them that are relevant.

Google’s automated review system may remove one or two from your listing, but this is not spam–provided you select relevant categories–. It helps you show up for as broad a range of searches as possible.

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »

Buy now » Info Website

Google calls this field “website,” but it doesn’t have to be your “website” per se. In particular, if you operate more than one location, you may want to enter the page on your website that corresponds to the location you’re submitting to Google (rather than your homepage). Opinions are mixed as to whether listing your homepage or a location page will help you rank better, so do what’s best for prospective customers. If you think your homepage will give them the best initial sense of your business, then submit that as your “website.” If a location page (or even some other page) will give them a better sense, submit that instead.

Secondary Business Information

After entering the attributes above, you’re asked to verify your listing. But don’t stop there. There are a few other attributes that are well worth your time to add.

Photos and Images

Photos may be the most neglected attribute in all of local search. The success of Instagram, Pinterest, and any number of lesser-known apps indicates just how visual our internet culture has become. Consumers often select (or reject) a business because of its photos. Not only on the content of the photos but their quality and professionalism.

Photos are especially important in the mobile ecosystem that Google My Business powers (including Google Maps), where they are the dominant representation of a business in Google’s card-focused user interface.

As with all local media or social media sites, Google My Business has its own image format requirements. Take some time to review them and make sure you have high-quality assets for each format.

Optimizing your photos also offers a great opportunity to engage your customers. At the very least place the ones you’re considering at your point of sale and ask them to choose which one they like better.  Or get even more creative and start a contest among your customers to show your business in its best light, with the winner–as voted on by other customers–receiving a cash prize or gift card.

Hours

Selecting your opening hours is pretty straightforward. Google has dramatically improved its interface for telling customers when you’re open over the past several years. Hours will be front-and-center wherever customers interact with your business on Google so they should definitely be accurate.

You can now even daypart multiple times during the day, and add specific hours for holidays and special events.

While you can’t control it, you may be interested to know that Google now displays the busy-ness of your business in real-time. This is based on aggregate location-tracking of visitors with Android phones and iOS Google Maps users with location services enabled.

Menu URLs

Certain categories of businesses will have the option to add a link to a menu.  If you’re lucky enough to be in one of these categories, I highly recommend adding this link, as it gives Google an additional set of keywords that your business for which should be considered relevant.

Advanced Information

These are low priority fields. All three are geared primarily towards large multi-location businesses and franchises.

Ranking factors beyond your control

Two significant ranking factors over which you have little control have to do with the physical location of your business.

The first is the proximity of your business to the location where your prospective customer is performing her search. All other things being equal, Google will choose to display a business closer to the searcher than one farther away from her.

In the early years of Google, its algorithm favored businesses which were close to the center of a given city or its “centroid.” Google simply wasn’t as good at detecting the location of the searcher. It defaulted to showing businesses in the areas of highest population density.

This factor has declined in importance, especially for mobile searches where Google has a precise idea of where you are. Google has also gotten better and better at detecting the location information of desktop searchers, partially through surreptitious means of collection.

The second factor is having an address in the city in which your customer is searching.  If your customer is searching in Seattle, your Tacoma or Bellevue-based coffee shop won’t appear, simply because it’s not relevant for that search.

Short of opening additional locations to target areas where high concentrations of your customers are searching, there’s not much you can do to optimize for these ranking factors, but you should be aware of their importance.

Google My Business Insights

Google provides a free, lightweight analytics package as part of GMB. This gives you a basic sense of how customers and potential customers are viewing and interacting with your listing.

Insights shows how many times your listing appears in plain old search vs. Google Maps. It also shows the number of clicks to your website, requests for driving directions, and phone calls.

There’s also a simple breakdown of how many customers see your listing for direct searches (for your business specifically) vs. discovery searches (for businesses in your category). While no one outside of Google is entirely sure how they calculate the discovery number, it’s probably as good a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO as any, particularly if you track it over time.

Unfortunately, this is harder than it should be, as GMB Insights are only visible as snapshots-in-time. Unless you remember to check them regularly and transfer them to a spreadsheet along with the date, it can be difficult to track your growth. Strangely, there’s no default longitudinal view built into the product.

Optimize your site to the max: get all our SEO plugins and extensions at once! Get our Yoast Complete SEO bundle and save money! »

Buy now » Info Troubleshooting GMB Listing Issues

The most common GMB troubleshooting issue continues to be the existence of duplicate listings for the same business. While it’s gotten harder to detect duplicate listings, it’s much easier to close them. I’ll cover why duplicate listings are bad for your business in future installments of this series.

The first step to identifying duplicates is to search for your business name on maps.google.com. You’ll see a little more comprehensive list of potentially-matching results than Google is willing to present on Google.com.

If it looks like multiple listings refer to your business, select the one you’d like to report as a duplicate and click “Suggest an Edit.” On the following screen, slide the “Place is permanently closed or never existed” bar to “Yes,” and select the radio button next to duplicate.

Google support staff are generally responsive to these kinds of reports within a week.  If you continue to have trouble, ask multiple people–co-workers, friends, family members, or relatives–to report the same problem, and it’s more likely Google will look at it.

If your issue seems particularly thorny, you’re most likely to get a response by tweeting @googlemybiz, the official Twitter support channel for GMB. And if Google support just isn’t cutting it, Joy Hawkins, who just started her own company last year after years as the GMB expert at a large agency, is an invaluable resource for troubleshooting additional issues.

The future of Google My Business

At various times in its past, Google My Business has seemed like the hot potato no one wanted to wind up holding at Google Headquarters.

That no longer seems to be the case. GMB has become Google’s front-line defense against Facebook’s overwhelming mindshare among small business owners. The main product has become much more robust. Google has released two major sub-products within GMB–Messaging and Posts–just within the last couple of months.

The goal of both products seems to be to get small business owners to engage with their customers via GMB on a regular basis, as opposed to a “set it and forget it” basis.

We’re also starting to see a handful of third-party integrations that allow customers to book appointments or order products directly from the Google search result for select businesses.

While it’s too early to tell whether usage of any of these new features might benefit your rankings, it’s something that experts in the local search community will be following closely in the coming months.

Summary

Represent your Name, Address, and Phone exactly as they appear to customers in the real world. These are not attributes to optimize.

Pay special attention to categories and select as many categories as are relevant for your business.

Upload great photos of your business, and if you don’t have any, consider hiring a professional photographer to do so.

Take advantage of the relatively new option to add a menu URL if you’re in a relevant business category.

Consider using the Discovery metric from GMB Insights as a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO.

Pay attention to new engagement features from Google as they’re released.

Read more: ‘Ranking your local business at Google: Introduction’ »

http://ift.tt/2iCFw2U

[rodrigueztha]

Ranking your local business part 2: Google My Business

This is the second post in an 8-part series on how to rank your business for local searches at Google. Google My Business (GMB) is a free product that allows business owners to verify and submit basic details about their business to Google. Owners can also engage with existing and potential customers across Google’s properties.

Eligibility for Google My Business

Verifying your location

Primary Business Information

Secondary Business Information

Ranking factors beyond your control

Google My Business Insights

Troubleshooting GMB Listing Issues

The future of Google My Business

Summary

Make sure your customers find your shop! Optimize your site with our Local SEO plugin and show your opening hours, locations, map and much more! »

Buy now » Info

After starting its life as a rudimentary web form called the Local Business Center, Google My Business has matured into a highly sophisticated product over the last decade. In the last couple of years, GMB received many improvements. GMB is an essential part of a well-thought-out local SEO strategy.

GMB offers highly-rated companion apps on both the App Store and Google Play. It also provides metrics about the visibility and engagement with your business that no other product does (including Google Analytics).

Eligibility for Google My Business

Any business with a bonafide brick-and-mortar location is eligible for a Google My Business listing at that location. For businesses with two or more locations, each location would be eligible for a distinct GMB listing.

A common question I get from business owners at conferences is:

“I operate my business out of my house and I don’t want people to know my address–what do I do?”

Well, if you don’t operate a walk-up brick-and-mortar location, but visit your customers in a particular geographic area, you’re what’s called a “Service Area Business.” Examples of Service Area Businesses are plumbers, carpet cleaners, and courier services. In this case, you’re still eligible for a listing. However, you’ll want to choose “Yes” when Google asks if you deliver goods and services to customers at their location.

Just because you serve customers in a given market does not mean you’re eligible for a Google My Business listing in that market. For example, an eCommerce company based in Chicago would not be eligible for a GMB listing in Dallas just because they had customers in Dallas.

Verifying your location

Google tries to make sure that only legitimate businesses are represented in GMB. It requires anyone who attempts to claim a Listing verify their association with the business in some way.

The easiest way to start the process is to perform a desktop search at Google for your business name (for example, “Pacific Seafood Portland”). In the panel on the right-hand side of the page, you’ll see a link that poses the question “Own this business?” Importantly–before you click that link to begin the verification process–make sure you are either not signed in to Google (you can create an account in the next step), or are signed into a Google account for your business as opposed to your personal Gmail.

It’s not a GMB requirement, though; however, it’ll be much easier to share access to your listing with employees or other agents of your company from a business account.

Once you fill out the most basic information (see below for what these details are), if it can corroborate your address and phone number, Google will call and ask you to enter a PIN number on screen. If it hasn’t previously seen a business with the phone number and address you submitted, you’ll be mailed a postcard within a week with instructions for how to PIN verify.

Primary Business Information Name, Address and Phone

This sounds simple, but it’s surprising how many business owners overthink these core attributes or try to “optimize” them.

Your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) are your basic thumbprint online. If they don’t reflect your business accurately at Google My Business, Google (and your customers) lose trust that you are who you say you are. They will stop sending business your way.

Do NOT stuff keywords in your business name. Represent yourself as you would answer the phone or welcome a customer into your store. You probably see spammers doing this and succeeding all the time, but at some point, it’ll come back to bite them. Google is monitoring for these kinds of abuses all the time and getting better at blacklisting the abusers.

Submit the same address you use on your website. (If you’re a Yoast user, this should be the address you enter in the Yoast Local SEO plugin.) Even if you’re a service-area business, you’ll have to submit a physical address and not a PO box or other mailing-only address.

You’ll see a map displayed just alongside your address. Zoom in and double-check that the pin is in the correct place on your business. Google’s pin precision for U.S. addresses is typically pretty good, but it can be spotty in other countries.

Don’t use a tracking phone number to segment customers coming from Google vs. other sources. There are ways to do this, but they’re pretty advanced. Implementing tracking numbers incorrectly can do tremendous damage to your local search rankings.

Category

From a rankings standpoint, the category field is the most important attribute you can optimize at Google My Business. In my experience, it’s best not to listen to Google’s advice on categories on this one, particularly since that advice has changed so frequently over the years.

Google maintains a taxonomy of several thousand categories to describe local businesses. By typing in a few characters of a keyword that describes your business, you’ll probably find a match pretty closely.

Google suggests “using as few categories as possible,” as well as categories that are “as specific as possible.”  And while it’s true that Google can and does “detect category information from your website and from mentions about your business throughout the web,” my advice is to explicitly specify as many relevant categories as you can on your Google My Business listing.

If you operate a small restaurant that’s open from 7 am – 3 pm, select “Breakfast Restaurant,” “Brunch Restaurant,” “Lunch Restaurant,” “Restaurant,” “Cafe,” “Coffee Shop,” and any other relevant category. Take the time to enter multiple keywords that describe your business and see which categories match. Use all of them that are relevant.

Google’s automated review system may remove one or two from your listing, but this is not spam–provided you select relevant categories–. It helps you show up for as broad a range of searches as possible.

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »

Buy now » Info Website

Google calls this field “website,” but it doesn’t have to be your “website” per se. In particular, if you operate more than one location, you may want to enter the page on your website that corresponds to the location you’re submitting to Google (rather than your homepage). Opinions are mixed as to whether listing your homepage or a location page will help you rank better, so do what’s best for prospective customers. If you think your homepage will give them the best initial sense of your business, then submit that as your “website.” If a location page (or even some other page) will give them a better sense, submit that instead.

Secondary Business Information

After entering the attributes above, you’re asked to verify your listing. But don’t stop there. There are a few other attributes that are well worth your time to add.

Photos and Images

Photos may be the most neglected attribute in all of local search. The success of Instagram, Pinterest, and any number of lesser-known apps indicates just how visual our internet culture has become. Consumers often select (or reject) a business because of its photos. Not only on the content of the photos but their quality and professionalism.

Photos are especially important in the mobile ecosystem that Google My Business powers (including Google Maps), where they are the dominant representation of a business in Google’s card-focused user interface.

As with all local media or social media sites, Google My Business has its own image format requirements. Take some time to review them and make sure you have high-quality assets for each format.

Optimizing your photos also offers a great opportunity to engage your customers. At the very least place the ones you’re considering at your point of sale and ask them to choose which one they like better.  Or get even more creative and start a contest among your customers to show your business in its best light, with the winner–as voted on by other customers–receiving a cash prize or gift card.

Hours

Selecting your opening hours is pretty straightforward. Google has dramatically improved its interface for telling customers when you’re open over the past several years. Hours will be front-and-center wherever customers interact with your business on Google so they should definitely be accurate.

You can now even daypart multiple times during the day, and add specific hours for holidays and special events.

While you can’t control it, you may be interested to know that Google now displays the busy-ness of your business in real-time. This is based on aggregate location-tracking of visitors with Android phones and iOS Google Maps users with location services enabled.

Menu URLs

Certain categories of businesses will have the option to add a link to a menu.  If you’re lucky enough to be in one of these categories, I highly recommend adding this link, as it gives Google an additional set of keywords that your business for which should be considered relevant.

Advanced Information

These are low priority fields. All three are geared primarily towards large multi-location businesses and franchises.

Ranking factors beyond your control

Two significant ranking factors over which you have little control have to do with the physical location of your business.

The first is the proximity of your business to the location where your prospective customer is performing her search. All other things being equal, Google will choose to display a business closer to the searcher than one farther away from her.

In the early years of Google, its algorithm favored businesses which were close to the center of a given city or its “centroid.” Google simply wasn’t as good at detecting the location of the searcher. It defaulted to showing businesses in the areas of highest population density.

This factor has declined in importance, especially for mobile searches where Google has a precise idea of where you are. Google has also gotten better and better at detecting the location information of desktop searchers, partially through surreptitious means of collection.

The second factor is having an address in the city in which your customer is searching.  If your customer is searching in Seattle, your Tacoma or Bellevue-based coffee shop won’t appear, simply because it’s not relevant for that search.

Short of opening additional locations to target areas where high concentrations of your customers are searching, there’s not much you can do to optimize for these ranking factors, but you should be aware of their importance.

Google My Business Insights

Google provides a free, lightweight analytics package as part of GMB. This gives you a basic sense of how customers and potential customers are viewing and interacting with your listing.

Insights shows how many times your listing appears in plain old search vs. Google Maps. It also shows the number of clicks to your website, requests for driving directions, and phone calls.

There’s also a simple breakdown of how many customers see your listing for direct searches (for your business specifically) vs. discovery searches (for businesses in your category). While no one outside of Google is entirely sure how they calculate the discovery number, it’s probably as good a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO as any, particularly if you track it over time.

Unfortunately, this is harder than it should be, as GMB Insights are only visible as snapshots-in-time. Unless you remember to check them regularly and transfer them to a spreadsheet along with the date, it can be difficult to track your growth. Strangely, there’s no default longitudinal view built into the product.

Optimize your site to the max: get all our SEO plugins and extensions at once! Get our Yoast Complete SEO bundle and save money! »

Buy now » Info Troubleshooting GMB Listing Issues

The most common GMB troubleshooting issue continues to be the existence of duplicate listings for the same business. While it’s gotten harder to detect duplicate listings, it’s much easier to close them. I’ll cover why duplicate listings are bad for your business in future installments of this series.

The first step to identifying duplicates is to search for your business name on maps.google.com. You’ll see a little more comprehensive list of potentially-matching results than Google is willing to present on Google.com.

If it looks like multiple listings refer to your business, select the one you’d like to report as a duplicate and click “Suggest an Edit.” On the following screen, slide the “Place is permanently closed or never existed” bar to “Yes,” and select the radio button next to duplicate.

Google support staff are generally responsive to these kinds of reports within a week.  If you continue to have trouble, ask multiple people–co-workers, friends, family members, or relatives–to report the same problem, and it’s more likely Google will look at it.

If your issue seems particularly thorny, you’re most likely to get a response by tweeting @googlemybiz, the official Twitter support channel for GMB. And if Google support just isn’t cutting it, Joy Hawkins, who just started her own company last year after years as the GMB expert at a large agency, is an invaluable resource for troubleshooting additional issues.

The future of Google My Business

At various times in its past, Google My Business has seemed like the hot potato no one wanted to wind up holding at Google Headquarters.

That no longer seems to be the case. GMB has become Google’s front-line defense against Facebook’s overwhelming mindshare among small business owners. The main product has become much more robust. Google has released two major sub-products within GMB–Messaging and Posts–just within the last couple of months.

The goal of both products seems to be to get small business owners to engage with their customers via GMB on a regular basis, as opposed to a “set it and forget it” basis.

We’re also starting to see a handful of third-party integrations that allow customers to book appointments or order products directly from the Google search result for select businesses.

While it’s too early to tell whether usage of any of these new features might benefit your rankings, it’s something that experts in the local search community will be following closely in the coming months.

Summary

Represent your Name, Address, and Phone exactly as they appear to customers in the real world. These are not attributes to optimize.

Pay special attention to categories and select as many categories as are relevant for your business.

Upload great photos of your business, and if you don’t have any, consider hiring a professional photographer to do so.

Take advantage of the relatively new option to add a menu URL if you’re in a relevant business category.

Consider using the Discovery metric from GMB Insights as a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO.

Pay attention to new engagement features from Google as they’re released.

Read more: ‘Ranking your local business at Google: Introduction’ »

http://ift.tt/2iCFw2U

[rodriguezthas]

Ranking your local business part 2: Google My Business

This is the second post in an 8-part series on how to rank your business for local searches at Google. Google My Business (GMB) is a free product that allows business owners to verify and submit basic details about their business to Google. Owners can also engage with existing and potential customers across Google’s properties.

Eligibility for Google My Business

Verifying your location

Primary Business Information

Secondary Business Information

Ranking factors beyond your control

Google My Business Insights

Troubleshooting GMB Listing Issues

The future of Google My Business

Summary

Make sure your customers find your shop! Optimize your site with our Local SEO plugin and show your opening hours, locations, map and much more! »

Buy now » Info

After starting its life as a rudimentary web form called the Local Business Center, Google My Business has matured into a highly sophisticated product over the last decade. In the last couple of years, GMB received many improvements. GMB is an essential part of a well-thought-out local SEO strategy.

GMB offers highly-rated companion apps on both the App Store and Google Play. It also provides metrics about the visibility and engagement with your business that no other product does (including Google Analytics).

Eligibility for Google My Business

Any business with a bonafide brick-and-mortar location is eligible for a Google My Business listing at that location. For businesses with two or more locations, each location would be eligible for a distinct GMB listing.

A common question I get from business owners at conferences is:

“I operate my business out of my house and I don’t want people to know my address–what do I do?”

Well, if you don’t operate a walk-up brick-and-mortar location, but visit your customers in a particular geographic area, you’re what’s called a “Service Area Business.” Examples of Service Area Businesses are plumbers, carpet cleaners, and courier services. In this case, you’re still eligible for a listing. However, you’ll want to choose “Yes” when Google asks if you deliver goods and services to customers at their location.

Just because you serve customers in a given market does not mean you’re eligible for a Google My Business listing in that market. For example, an eCommerce company based in Chicago would not be eligible for a GMB listing in Dallas just because they had customers in Dallas.

Verifying your location

Google tries to make sure that only legitimate businesses are represented in GMB. It requires anyone who attempts to claim a Listing verify their association with the business in some way.

The easiest way to start the process is to perform a desktop search at Google for your business name (for example, “Pacific Seafood Portland”). In the panel on the right-hand side of the page, you’ll see a link that poses the question “Own this business?” Importantly–before you click that link to begin the verification process–make sure you are either not signed in to Google (you can create an account in the next step), or are signed into a Google account for your business as opposed to your personal Gmail.

It’s not a GMB requirement, though; however, it’ll be much easier to share access to your listing with employees or other agents of your company from a business account.

Once you fill out the most basic information (see below for what these details are), if it can corroborate your address and phone number, Google will call and ask you to enter a PIN number on screen. If it hasn’t previously seen a business with the phone number and address you submitted, you’ll be mailed a postcard within a week with instructions for how to PIN verify.

Primary Business Information Name, Address and Phone

This sounds simple, but it’s surprising how many business owners overthink these core attributes or try to “optimize” them.

Your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) are your basic thumbprint online. If they don’t reflect your business accurately at Google My Business, Google (and your customers) lose trust that you are who you say you are. They will stop sending business your way.

Do NOT stuff keywords in your business name. Represent yourself as you would answer the phone or welcome a customer into your store. You probably see spammers doing this and succeeding all the time, but at some point, it’ll come back to bite them. Google is monitoring for these kinds of abuses all the time and getting better at blacklisting the abusers.

Submit the same address you use on your website. (If you’re a Yoast user, this should be the address you enter in the Yoast Local SEO plugin.) Even if you’re a service-area business, you’ll have to submit a physical address and not a PO box or other mailing-only address.

You’ll see a map displayed just alongside your address. Zoom in and double-check that the pin is in the correct place on your business. Google’s pin precision for U.S. addresses is typically pretty good, but it can be spotty in other countries.

Don’t use a tracking phone number to segment customers coming from Google vs. other sources. There are ways to do this, but they’re pretty advanced. Implementing tracking numbers incorrectly can do tremendous damage to your local search rankings.

Category

From a rankings standpoint, the category field is the most important attribute you can optimize at Google My Business. In my experience, it’s best not to listen to Google’s advice on categories on this one, particularly since that advice has changed so frequently over the years.

Google maintains a taxonomy of several thousand categories to describe local businesses. By typing in a few characters of a keyword that describes your business, you’ll probably find a match pretty closely.

Google suggests “using as few categories as possible,” as well as categories that are “as specific as possible.”  And while it’s true that Google can and does “detect category information from your website and from mentions about your business throughout the web,” my advice is to explicitly specify as many relevant categories as you can on your Google My Business listing.

If you operate a small restaurant that’s open from 7 am – 3 pm, select “Breakfast Restaurant,” “Brunch Restaurant,” “Lunch Restaurant,” “Restaurant,” “Cafe,” “Coffee Shop,” and any other relevant category. Take the time to enter multiple keywords that describe your business and see which categories match. Use all of them that are relevant.

Google’s automated review system may remove one or two from your listing, but this is not spam–provided you select relevant categories–. It helps you show up for as broad a range of searches as possible.

Optimize your site for search & social media and keep it optimized with Yoast SEO Premium »

Buy now » Info Website

Google calls this field “website,” but it doesn’t have to be your “website” per se. In particular, if you operate more than one location, you may want to enter the page on your website that corresponds to the location you’re submitting to Google (rather than your homepage). Opinions are mixed as to whether listing your homepage or a location page will help you rank better, so do what’s best for prospective customers. If you think your homepage will give them the best initial sense of your business, then submit that as your “website.” If a location page (or even some other page) will give them a better sense, submit that instead.

Secondary Business Information

After entering the attributes above, you’re asked to verify your listing. But don’t stop there. There are a few other attributes that are well worth your time to add.

Photos and Images

Photos may be the most neglected attribute in all of local search. The success of Instagram, Pinterest, and any number of lesser-known apps indicates just how visual our internet culture has become. Consumers often select (or reject) a business because of its photos. Not only on the content of the photos but their quality and professionalism.

Photos are especially important in the mobile ecosystem that Google My Business powers (including Google Maps), where they are the dominant representation of a business in Google’s card-focused user interface.

As with all local media or social media sites, Google My Business has its own image format requirements. Take some time to review them and make sure you have high-quality assets for each format.

Optimizing your photos also offers a great opportunity to engage your customers. At the very least place the ones you’re considering at your point of sale and ask them to choose which one they like better.  Or get even more creative and start a contest among your customers to show your business in its best light, with the winner–as voted on by other customers–receiving a cash prize or gift card.

Hours

Selecting your opening hours is pretty straightforward. Google has dramatically improved its interface for telling customers when you’re open over the past several years. Hours will be front-and-center wherever customers interact with your business on Google so they should definitely be accurate.

You can now even daypart multiple times during the day, and add specific hours for holidays and special events.

While you can’t control it, you may be interested to know that Google now displays the busy-ness of your business in real-time. This is based on aggregate location-tracking of visitors with Android phones and iOS Google Maps users with location services enabled.

Menu URLs

Certain categories of businesses will have the option to add a link to a menu.  If you’re lucky enough to be in one of these categories, I highly recommend adding this link, as it gives Google an additional set of keywords that your business for which should be considered relevant.

Advanced Information

These are low priority fields. All three are geared primarily towards large multi-location businesses and franchises.

Ranking factors beyond your control

Two significant ranking factors over which you have little control have to do with the physical location of your business.

The first is the proximity of your business to the location where your prospective customer is performing her search. All other things being equal, Google will choose to display a business closer to the searcher than one farther away from her.

In the early years of Google, its algorithm favored businesses which were close to the center of a given city or its “centroid.” Google simply wasn’t as good at detecting the location of the searcher. It defaulted to showing businesses in the areas of highest population density.

This factor has declined in importance, especially for mobile searches where Google has a precise idea of where you are. Google has also gotten better and better at detecting the location information of desktop searchers, partially through surreptitious means of collection.

The second factor is having an address in the city in which your customer is searching.  If your customer is searching in Seattle, your Tacoma or Bellevue-based coffee shop won’t appear, simply because it’s not relevant for that search.

Short of opening additional locations to target areas where high concentrations of your customers are searching, there’s not much you can do to optimize for these ranking factors, but you should be aware of their importance.

Google My Business Insights

Google provides a free, lightweight analytics package as part of GMB. This gives you a basic sense of how customers and potential customers are viewing and interacting with your listing.

Insights shows how many times your listing appears in plain old search vs. Google Maps. It also shows the number of clicks to your website, requests for driving directions, and phone calls.

There’s also a simple breakdown of how many customers see your listing for direct searches (for your business specifically) vs. discovery searches (for businesses in your category). While no one outside of Google is entirely sure how they calculate the discovery number, it’s probably as good a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO as any, particularly if you track it over time.

Unfortunately, this is harder than it should be, as GMB Insights are only visible as snapshots-in-time. Unless you remember to check them regularly and transfer them to a spreadsheet along with the date, it can be difficult to track your growth. Strangely, there’s no default longitudinal view built into the product.

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Buy now » Info Troubleshooting GMB Listing Issues

The most common GMB troubleshooting issue continues to be the existence of duplicate listings for the same business. While it’s gotten harder to detect duplicate listings, it’s much easier to close them. I’ll cover why duplicate listings are bad for your business in future installments of this series.

The first step to identifying duplicates is to search for your business name on maps.google.com. You’ll see a little more comprehensive list of potentially-matching results than Google is willing to present on Google.com.

If it looks like multiple listings refer to your business, select the one you’d like to report as a duplicate and click “Suggest an Edit.” On the following screen, slide the “Place is permanently closed or never existed” bar to “Yes,” and select the radio button next to duplicate.

Google support staff are generally responsive to these kinds of reports within a week.  If you continue to have trouble, ask multiple people–co-workers, friends, family members, or relatives–to report the same problem, and it’s more likely Google will look at it.

If your issue seems particularly thorny, you’re most likely to get a response by tweeting @googlemybiz, the official Twitter support channel for GMB. And if Google support just isn’t cutting it, Joy Hawkins, who just started her own company last year after years as the GMB expert at a large agency, is an invaluable resource for troubleshooting additional issues.

The future of Google My Business

At various times in its past, Google My Business has seemed like the hot potato no one wanted to wind up holding at Google Headquarters.

That no longer seems to be the case. GMB has become Google’s front-line defense against Facebook’s overwhelming mindshare among small business owners. The main product has become much more robust. Google has released two major sub-products within GMB–Messaging and Posts–just within the last couple of months.

The goal of both products seems to be to get small business owners to engage with their customers via GMB on a regular basis, as opposed to a “set it and forget it” basis.

We’re also starting to see a handful of third-party integrations that allow customers to book appointments or order products directly from the Google search result for select businesses.

While it’s too early to tell whether usage of any of these new features might benefit your rankings, it’s something that experts in the local search community will be following closely in the coming months.

Summary

Represent your Name, Address, and Phone exactly as they appear to customers in the real world. These are not attributes to optimize.

Pay special attention to categories and select as many categories as are relevant for your business.

Upload great photos of your business, and if you don’t have any, consider hiring a professional photographer to do so.

Take advantage of the relatively new option to add a menu URL if you’re in a relevant business category.

Consider using the Discovery metric from GMB Insights as a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO.

Pay attention to new engagement features from Google as they’re released.

Read more: ‘Ranking your local business at Google: Introduction’ »

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