Local SEO is a shockingly undervalued resource in today’s SEO battlefield, and none more so than your Google My Business listing. Your local listings (or local SEO) on Google have been with us for over 3 years, yet they are still criminally overlooked by both end clients and SEO agencies. It’s 2016, and yet most SEOs are still talking about organic listings as being the peak of SEO when there’s something above them. If I told you there was a free listing that cost nothing to advertise on Google’s front page, which was above organic listings and yet had more credibility than the Adwords just above it, you’d bite my hand off, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s precisely what Google offers all companies daily, yet the opportunity is seldom exploited.
In fact, local listings are a great leveller. Whether you’re big or small, you have the opportunity to fight whether you’re a single-site concern against a multi-site megacorporation, well, at least in your own locality, which is at least probably where your audience is sited anyway! ‘So, show me where to sign up?’ I hear you say.
The first thing to do is to go to Google My Business and check whether your company is already listed. Chances are, if you’re an established company, you will be. The problem can be if it’s already been claimed by somebody else. This may have been an employee or agency working for you previously. In that case, you are looking at a somewhat protracted process of requesting it from the previous claimant if you can’t work out the partial e-mail that Google will provide you as the only information for you to determine who it might be. If you have difficulty, contact us to help you reclaim what is rightfully yours.
