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Why Google Places is Important for International Business?

According to Google, 97% of consumers search for local businesses online. Submitting your local offices and shops is a good idea as a best practice for Global SEO. A lot of users will use “Keyword+location” when they make a local search for services or product. Implementing your locations will help your Global SEO gain an effective rank and maintain high visibility with your potential customers.

google-places-local-search

Best Practices for Google Places Listings

In order to obtain an effective local listing you will need to follow some of the basic rules for a Google Places listing:

  • Add your company or business name exactly as it appears in the offline world.

o   Avoid including marketing or advertising text and keywords in your business name.

o   Use full company name and avoid shortcuts or special characters.

  • Use an accurate Business Location with your physical office location.

o    Insert a very specific Address including area, street, floor and suite number into Address Line 1, and put your mail box or suite number in Address Line 2.

o    Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.

o    If your business provides different services in different areas you should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas.  Learn how to add service areas to your listing.

o    Avoid including advertising information into the address lines that does not pertain to your business’s physical location (e.g. URLs, keywords).

  • Make sure you list all of your phone numbers for the listed location including office numbers, toll free numbers, mobile numbers and fax numbers.

o    Provide only the phone numbers that represents your individual business location.

o    Use a local phone number instead of a call center number whenever possible.

  • Use the local version of your website and email address. If you are listing your business in USA you will need of course to use the English version of your website not another language version.
  • Add all your local services to the category form. This will help with indexing your local services for each local SERPs.

o    Categories should describe what your business is (e.g. Translation), not on what it does (e.g. translate into Spanish).

  • It is very important to use localized information for your local content. For instance, if you are listing your business office in Mexico City,  it is more effective to provide all the listing information in Spanish not English. Always keep in mind you are targeting local online users.

Google Places

For more information check Google places useful links:

Google Maps

Google Maps is one of the strongest tools created by Google. Maps are always important because it helps local searcher to locate what they are looking for easily.  Secondly, if you have a business office or shop that provides services in that specific area you can also add your business in local listing and people can discover you by navigating the maps.

Google, Google Places, the Google logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Google Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Website Localization Benefits for Local Search

Websites are the access point for your local markets. It is very important to have fully localized websites and information for each local market. A fully localized website in the locale language will always have a direct impact on your local presence and your firm’s SEO results. Online users will always tend to search the local version of your websites in order to get local prices, services descriptions and contact information. For more information check our blog post 10 Tips for Website Localization.

The Benefits of Google Places for Local SEO Results

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your multilingual websites for Google local search in order to obtain the best rank and visibility in Google local index.

Global businesses are investing more and more time and resources to expand their online presence and achieve better sales in local places where they are represented. By using localized websites for local markets, it has been proven that businesses will be more likely to achieve their goal of being found by a local search because they have higher rankings (SERPS – search engine results pages) in the search engines.

You may gain further insights into Global SEO and related topics by reviewing previous blogs written by GPI: