The Importance of Claiming Your Google Local Business Listing

April 9, 2010 - Yet another one of Google's great free tools for businesses puts your law firm on the map - literally. The Google Local Business Center is a free tool that allows local businesses like yours to pinpoint itself on the Google Maps for your area, updating your office address from a street number to your full business name, hours, information, and most important - a link to your website.

Your office can benefit from this tremendously and it only takes a few minutes to set up. If your office is in a larger building with multiple businesses, it's important to claim your listing quickly. We reported previously on the early stages of Google Local Search, and later on tips for optimizing your local search content.

There are several ranking factors Google uses to determine your ranking in local search results:

• Where your office addresses are - If your physical address is in Minneapolis, but you also want to appear in St. Paul searches, you'll need to list a physical address there as well.
• Listings from other sources - The more local listing websites your office is on, the better, as Google uses them to cross-check the validity of your listing.
• Association of proper business listing categories - You can add multiple categories; just make sure they're the most relevant ones.
• Critical keywords used in listing title - If you have multiple practice areas, you'll have to pick one that you think clients will search for the most.
• Inbound links - The sites that link to you; the best sources are other directory websites that list your business name and phone number.
• Customer reviews - Google listings allow customers to do 1-to-5 star reviews of businesses. Don't be afraid to ask for customer testimonials!
• Site content relevance - The more your title keywords are mentioned on your actual site content, the better.
• Full address on contact page - Even better if you put it on your site's header/footer or side bar so it shows up on every page, Google looks for this and will actually rank your site higher the closer you are to the center of the city.

Including locally identifying keywords in your custom SEO content is a good way to identify your location to website crawlers and boost your search engine rankings. Google uses your client's IP address to geo-locate them and targets websites with locally relevant content to display in their search results. The more times your content mentions your city and state, the higher you'll rank in searches.

We Do Web Content will not only help create locally relevant content for your practice, but we also offer help in creating and optimizing your local search listings. For affordable, quality content exclusive to YOUR website, blog and clients, contact us today!  1-888-521-3880