Local SEO: How to get local business showing up in Google Local
-
Hello,
We moved to a small town in Council, ID. It's interesting. None of the businesses around here are showing up in Google Local - map, phone number, hours, etc. Nothing. It's all Yelp and stuff.
Is there some sort of collective local SEO that has to be done to get Council, ID on the map? It's kind of strange that no businesses show up. I want to help local businesses, but I don't know if Google will even register them. We can get a group of local businesses together if we have to.
Let me know what we can do.
Thanks.
-
Hi Bob,
Good luck with your presentation! I think you have an interesting opportunity residing and working in a small town. Like you, I live in a rural area beyond a larger, good-sized city. I find it interesting to study local SERPs in areas like this - they sometimes provide unique insights into Google's 'thinking' when there are fewer options/less data. In the coming months, who knows what you might learn from closely studying your local SERPs?
-
Miriam,
Thanks. I am going to do a free presentation about how to get a knowledge panel result or to be in local results pack. You are right, there are a few things that are showing up. I'll proceed as planned with local SEO. Thanks. You are the best.
-
Hey Bob!
Just checking back in with you to see if you found community input helpful on this, or if you have further questions.
-
Hi Bob,
Like Miriam said, the population of the town is likely too small to generate enough data for Google to use for the normal local pack results that you are accustomed to.
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that you'd be able to get the local pack set up for this area. I would try focusing your online efforts in the surrounding areas that might be slightly larger. Even though you're not located in the area, you might be relatively close enough to bump some other companies out of the local pack.
Good luck!
-
Hey Bob,
I see your new town is quite small - population 839. So, this would be one of those scenarios in which we have to realize that Google shows local results based on their internal logic. If Google is showing NO local results at all for your town, then it's an indication that they don't have sufficient data to create a local data set.
But, before we decide that this is going on, I'm doing some searches to verify whether there are literally no results. Here's what I see:
Term: gas station council id
Results: a 2-pack from the area surrounding your town
Term: grocery store council ID
Results: a knowledge panel result for a single grocery store
Term: church council ID
Results: a 3-pack of churches in your town
So, I'm 3/3 here, finding local results for your town, which is a good thing. With such a small population, I'm guessing that there aren't a ton of businesses in your town, but from my brief searches, my bet would be that with proper local SEO, you could at least get a knowledge panel result for some of these businesses if they are one-of-a-kind in that town, or see them appear in a 2-or-3-pack if there are multiple businesses in the same category.
Now, that being said, as someone who wants to offer Local SEO to your neighbors, it's going to be very important that you approach the SERPs as they currently stand. If, for example, you want to market the only bakery in town, and a search for 'bakery council id' is bringing up no Google local results but a page of organic results from Yelp, YP, TripAdvisor, Facebook, etc., then you have a path to follow. You must ensure that your bakery client is properly listed on all of the platforms that are appearing in the first few pages for this search, and that their information on these platforms is 100% accurate and complete. A tool like the free Moz Check Listing tool is also a great way to find any duplicates or inconsistencies on the major platforms that you'll want to correct. And, of course, you'd want to make sure that the bakery's own website is good enough to rank for this term organically.
Upshot: it would be good to earn Google local results for your clients, but if Google simply will not show any local results for a certain category of search, you need to be sure you're optimizing the first few pages of the results that do come up, so that your client is earning traffic and conversions.
Hope this helps!
-
You usually just need a google my business page and a google + local brand page. Fill out the information and verify the business. This should allow your business to show up in local search on google. Verification is very important. Without it the business will not be published on google +.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Local News or National News backlinking?
Hello guys, I got an two offers, one from national newspaper and one from local newspaper (both online and printed editions, but here is online edition relevant.) to write about my company because we had some remarkable results in our niche. They would write a text about 2.000 words long and put a backlink to my website with the anchor text of my choice! The national newspaper has DA 49, whereas local newspaper has DA 39 but comes from the same city where we are based and writes just about the specific city and district in this city. Which one would you choose for your SEO?
Local Listings | | Suksinho0 -
Seasonal Setting Options for Google My Business
Hi there, Not sure if anyone will have any insight but I have a seasonal business that I am closed for from September to March. I don't want to mark my business as "permanently closed" through Google My Business as I don't want my customers to think I've gone out of business. I've seen a few times through forums that you can change your business to temporarily closed, but I can't find the specifics on how to do this. Any insight, suggestion or resources would be great! Thanks!
Local Listings | | MainstreamMktg1 -
Google Events Pack - Our events never show up while others not related do
When doing a search for "des moines wa events" the top results are the events pack. When we do a search, none of the events are even happening in Des Monies but in Seattle proper. Our pages have events schema on them and they do get warnings but no errors. Here is a link to one of our events pages in Des Moines that does not show up. Is there anything wrong with our page that could be preventing it from ranking? What are the factors that get events to rank in that area? What else could we be doing to improve our results?
Local Listings | | GRDigital0 -
Google Knowledge Graph Carousel
Hi - I am trying to get on the Google Knowledge Graph Carousel. I've set up G+, YouTube, Consistent NAP, local business schema, etc. but still have not been featured. Can you please help me figure out why I cannot get a carousel feature. Please help me determine what I am missing.
Local Listings | | mmmeans0 -
Duplicate Google Plus and Google My Business Listings
My business has duplicate listings for both Google + and Google Places or Maps or My Business or whatever it's called today. Of course the listings that I want to show are marked as duplicates, and the only option is to remove the duplicates. Is there any way to merge these listings or switch which one Google recognizes?
Local Listings | | lmsybiatb0 -
Adding new business location. Google My Businesses vs. Google Map Maker
Hi everybody, Adding new business location. Is it better for local visibility to add it via Google My Businesses dashboard directly or via Google Map Maker first (and then claim it in My Businesses dashboard)? Thanks
Local Listings | | Ryan_V0 -
Local Citations
So we are working on our citations. Now the issue is (not really an issue, but it is definitely very annoying) is that we have multiple locations. I get that you need to then have multiple listings. Where I get baffled is that I have read that you will then need to have more than 1 google + account for the different addresses. That seems like a lot of work to keep two google + accounts updated. Is this a must for SEO purposes?
Local Listings | | blackrino0 -
How to track google business traffic as organic into google analytics?
Hi mozzers, After noticing that all Google business(known in the past as google places) traffic gets recorded into direct traffic I would like to get this into organic traffic instead. What is the best method to do so? I found this great post http://moz.com/blog/tracking-traffic-from-google-places-in-google-analytics by Rebecca Lehmann but was written in 2011. Are these method the only one available to track this traffic or is there a new method we could try that would track all this traffic into organic search? Thanks for letting me know!
Local Listings | | Ideas-Money-Art0