Welcome to my monthly column, helping Kirklees businesses to achieve more from websites, by attracting more visitors, selling more products and communicating more effectively.

Last month I discussed the importance of loyalty in developing a successful e-commerce business and how you can put excellent business practices in place to grow retail sales. This month I would like to talk about Google Places, which is the integration of Google Maps into a Google search when you add a specific area to the search, for example ‘Hairdressers in Dewsbury’ or ‘Plumbers in Mirfield’.

Google Places

With over a third of all internet searches in the UK now including a geographic keyword (and more than 80 per cent when searched using a mobile phone), doing everything you can to ensure your listing is visible is essential – you will be losing out to your competitors if not. And, when accessed via smartphone, your Places result will also feature ‘tap to call’ allowing the searcher to easily telephone you. This feature makes having a strong Places listing even more necessary.

In Google terminology a geographic key phrase is a term that will include a town, city or county and the searcher’s machine is visible to Google, ie their location is defined. If optimised correctly your Places results can also show up based on the searcher’s address location, even when specific geographic modifiers are not included in the search query.

Getting more from Places

Google Places is completely free, but that doesn’t mean that you should just create a listing and expect it to work for you.

Having an optimised Places listing will mean that you show up more of the time and will help you to generate greater volumes of free long-term traffic, similar to the way SEO benefits a website. By continuously updating the content in your Places listing, adding video and images of your business and events, you are helping Google to see that your business is thriving and alive and will help it to appear higher up the list.

By continuously updating the content in your Places listing, adding video and images of your business and events, you are helping Google to see that your business is thriving and alive and will help it to appear higher up the list.

To read more on this and other subjects, visit the blog at www.ascensor.co.uk/blog.

For more information contact andrew@ascensor.co.uk
Follow me on Twitter: @andrewjfirth
Connect on LinkedIn: andrewjfirth

Web realities:The UK online retail market grew 14 per cent year-on-year in October, with Britons spending an estimated £5.9bn shopping on the internet." IMRG

Ascensor are a full service website design, ecommerce and search engine marketing company. For a free, no obligation website review contact sales@ascensor.co.uk..