I just read this article at Website Magazine and wanted to share it with you. It has some great tips on going local with Google+ and how you can leverage exposure on Google. With local search results being pushed ahead of most organic results, leveraging your location makes great sense.
Here’s a quick synopsis as well as my own comments and suggestions on going local with Google+.
1. Make sure to focus on your About Page
Make sure your address and categories are listed as well as a descriptive paragraph about your business.
2. Encourage others to review you on Google+
I’ll add my own comments to this one… if you don’t ask you won’t get a review. Consider sending a link out to all your satisfied customers asking them to login to Google+ and leave some comments on your page. These recommendations can be a gold mine for your business so work to see if you can build your number of reviews. Don’t scam Google! I’ve seen some situations where reviews were clearly fake, don’t buy services to make fake reviews for your Google+ Local page. Google is getting too smart to not be watching the IP addresses on reviews at this point.
3. Build a free Google+ Community for your business
My comments again… Community pages are much more interactive that Google+ business pages. They operate more like a forum. You can have closed or open communities and even those by invitation only or moderator approved. For now Communities look stronger to me than Business Pages but Communities do not allow status update scheduling as Business pages do with third party apps.
4. Think about Google Offers
This could be good for local businesses. Here’s more information so you can dig deeper on this one. It appears kind of like Groupon but from Google. Interesting for possibly driving in discount traffic for certain types of businesses but not for everyone.
If you have another tip for going local, just click comments below and leave your own words of wisdom.