Let’s Put Hopkinsville on the Map with Google
Let’s Put Hopkinsville on the Map. Or for our friends that aren’t local, your own city. As long as you’re a small business with a brick and mortar in a city Google wants to put you on the map. Their Get Your Business Online initiative aims to give local business owners the tools to easily claim their local listings and get found more easily by potential customers. If you are a business that operates from a building as well as a home, you want to make sure your online presence is a good one, which means ensuring that you are always connected through a strong internet service. This may mean checking out some spectrum internet plans or plans with your location so that you are able to navigate your online business in a positive way.
With this step-by-step guide, Google walks businesses through the process of enhancing their local listing.
First, they’ll look at whether you’re even there to begin with. If you are, you’ll go on to enter category information, service areas, and you’ll need to take ownership of the page. From here you can edit the description of your business, add photos, hours of operation and more. This will also be a place potential customers will see reviews of your business. Google allows you to read and respond to those reviews, see site trends and analytics, and even schedule Google Ads from the easy-to-use dashboard.
Read our recent post about mobile-friendly sites where we highlight the importance of local search and the impact it has on your business. You’ll read more about the importance of claiming local listings and maintaining your web presence so that potential customers can find you. After all, isn’t keeping the phones ringing and customers coming in what your business is all about? You will need to make sure that you are managing your business listings efficiently as your business grows, so you are consistently bringing in that traffic with resources like Reputation.com that can assist with the management process. That said, one of the most important ways of growing the business could be by bringing your trade to a global audience. Imagine customers from across the world desiring to purchase your products. Getting goosebumps, right? Now imagine having all of your reviews across various social sites in one place (you could know more by clicking here) – how does it feel? Wondrous, isn’t it?
However, to get global customers, you will need quick and convenient global payment processing methods that can exhibit relevant currencies and can create a localized shopping experience by automatically updating checkout languages according to your customers’ locations. That said, to acquire these features in global payment processing methods, you might need to contact firms like FastSpring that are known to offer top-quality global merchant services.
Anyway, coming back to the topic, Google in their blog post says, “If we want to help every business in the U.S., we need to reach businesses where they are. So this tailor-made program provides each city with a custom website where local businesses can find helpful resources, including a new diagnostic tool that shows businesses how they appear on Search and Maps, a step-by-step guide for getting online with Google My Business, and a free website and domain name for one year with our partner, Startlogic,”. Continue reading more about the background to Google’s Get Your Business Online initiative here.
Williams Advertising has applied to be a partner to help grow Google’s initiative, and Google says to look out for Chamber of Commerce and Small Business Development Center’s involvement in trainings soon too. Read more about our paid services to help with web here, and keep checking back for helpful tips.