We have all heard of Google and likely search it daily for many things…but are you using it to attract and maintain business? If your customers can’t find you online, they may wind up taking their business elsewhere. Today’s customer realizes that time is money and e-commerce trumps phoning in orders. Separately, if potential customers don’t know you exist, or can’t easily contact you, then growing your business becomes considerably harder. One of the top reasons people get frustrated with a brand is when they are unable to locate a phone number or email to get in touch.

GET STARTED WITH A FREE GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE

According to a recent article on Business2community.com, more than 63,000 searches are made per second and 90% of searchers haven’t decided on a brand before starting their search. Capitalize on these stats by creating your business profile on Google (Google Business Profile). Your business profile includes company name, address, business hours, products, services, logos, images, etc.

Google uses a step-by-step process walking users through the set-up. Once completed, you can begin sharing updates, special offers, company news and new product alerts like you would on other social media platforms. If done correctly, Google has the power to reach a wider audience of people who are more likely to be searching for something they are looking for. The more you post on your business profile, the higher your rankings become and the easier it is for people to find out about your business.

Your Google Business Profile will display when someone searches for your company on Google. While this sounds obvious, if you search for a company that doesn’t a profile, it makes it harder to access information about them, and their website can be more difficult to find. The more you populate your profile and post, the more customers and prospects will learn about your business. Updating your profile regularly will also increase your online exposure and improve your site’s rankings. With a Google Business Profile, you can gain customer insight, including how customers found your listing and any actions they may have taken. Use customer insight to improve your business.

YOUR PROFILE IS COMPLETE, NOW WHAT?

Once your profile is complete, you can start running simple campaigns like asking for and sharing reviews and adding Google Maps to your profile. Reviews are important when potential customers are looking to do business with your company. They give you a credibility that goes beyond the words of your best copy writer. Good reviews can help close business. While bad reviews aren’t ideal, it is important to respond to them to show you are taking care of the issue. It’s good to carve out time regularly to ask for and respond to ALL reviews.

If your customers can’t easily and quickly find you online, they may wind up taking their business elsewhere.

Now you are becoming a pro…your profile is looking good; you have happy customers…this is a good time to experiment with pay per click (PPC) and retargeting ads to take your business to the next level. Make sure someone on your team is up to date with Google as they constantly change their verifying process, rules, and reporting. If you don’t have someone who can help, I recommend finding a consultant.

YOUR WEBSITE

Google can only handle so much of your digital marketing. You must lead people somewhere to close sales…this is your website. We have done other blogs on building a good website, for this blog we will discuss the importance of optimization — SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO drives traffic to your website and provides more ways for you to convert traffic to customers. Many businesses underestimate the power of SEO and will leave it in the hands of an intern or someone without experience. Other companies don’t do anything to optimize their sites at all. If you don’t have an internal resource, again, hire a consultant.

Do your research on hiring an expert because finding someone who knows what they are doing isn’t easy. Start by asking for referrals, reviewing companies online or create a job post and hire directly. You will need to know what you are looking for and what the job entails which includes things like, meta-tags, backlinks, copy writing, keyword research, tagging images and doing work on your website and in social media to compliment all your efforts. are part of a successful strategy. As mentioned above, Google changes its algorithms often, so companies need to be up to date on the ins and out of SEO, so your page rankings don’t drop.

GOING BEYOND SEO TO PPC

Once you have your SEO sorted out and your site is improving, you can explore Paid Search. Again, we like to leave this work to the experts who can do keyword research, copy writing, testing, tagging, etc. Paid search is our number one source for traffic and conversions. In a short time SVF knows that 20% of our leads come from paid search. The quality of those leads is better since they are actively searching for products or services, rather than passively scrolling through their newsfeed. The more time you spend perfecting ads, the faster your results will improve.

DON’T DISCOUNT OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Some are not a fan of Google and are choosing a more private alternative so you will want to consider adding other search engines to your marketing arsenal. These include Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Baidu, etc. If you want to see how people are finding you now, you can check your Google Analytics for that and other information that will be helpful when setting up campaigns and expanding your marketing reach.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. In future blogs we will cover retargeting, social ads, boosting and other digital campaigns worth exploring.