What Does “Claim a Business Listing” Mean?
Claiming your business listing on Google is a way to help build your online presence that’s easy, effective, and—best of all—free!
Claiming your business listing on Google is a way to help build your online presence that’s easy, effective, and—best of all—free!
Google offers various tools, including the ability to create a Google My Business page and Google+ account. While the two platforms are both hosted by Google, it’s important to understand that they are not the same.
Not only do good reviews on Google, Facebook and Yelp improve the appearance of your business to interested customers, but the proper interactions with them can improve your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) — meaning better SEO!
Website titles, meta descriptions, keywords, headers, URLs, links and alt tags are all crucial elements that can help your site’s SEO exponentially when formatted properly.
It’s important to note that as a business owner, you are not completely powerless when it comes to negative reviews. You cannot delete a bad review yourself, but you can flag a review and report it to Google to review. If Google agrees that the review should not be online, they will remove it.
Inconsistent and incorrect business listings do more then just make your business look unprofessional – they can also seriously frustrate customers who rely on them.
Way before Google and Facebook and life as we know it, business owners depended on word-of-mouth marketing from happy customers to recommend their business to friends and family. While referrals are still important, consumers today also have access to a plethora of review sites where they can read reviews from any customer that wanted to leave one. In fact, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as they would trust a friend’s recommendation. That being said, online reputation management is extremely important for business growth.
If you’re a business owner, you know how important it is to have accurate information available online for customers to easily access. Since Google is the most popular search engine, it’s therefore essential that your business has a strong presence on it and uses a Google Business Listing.