subject: Staying Ahead In The Google Places Listing [print this page] It is important to correctly optimize your Google Places listing to make sure that it comes up the top. If we were claiming Melbourne SEO Services review, it would be dave at melbourneseoservices. That's the email address you'd register. When you enter in your company name, don't use any funny business. We did things early on where we tried to heavily load our keyword that we wanted to come up for into that title. Google got wise to that and said, no, we really don't like that game. We want your business to be listed as you would find it on your letterhead.
So that's a benefit as to why we tried to incorporate Melbourne SEO Services into our name because we get to use our name as well for things like Google Places. There are a whole lot of factors that come into play here. Depending on how it's done, I think they just don't want anything to look too spammy. If we have a look at another website, ISO Consulting, we did sneak some extra keywords in here. We put in ISC and we also put in ISO consultants. This causes it to come up for that keyword but it's got to feel a little bit like a company name.
For this one, this is doing quite well because it's in a less competitive landscape. If it's in a really competitive landscape, you'll slightly need to tweak it without trying to stuff too many keywords in there.
When you enter in your Google Places listing, make sure you put your real physical address in. That's important; you can hide it at a later stage. Let's say you're a mobile mechanic and you don't really have a physical address, then you can hide it later if you don't want them coming around to your house or whatever. So put your real address in and it's all got to do with verification. The big thing early on is they want to make you tick all of Google's boxes so they say, yes this is a listing we can trust and verify.
Then you select the categories that you want to get assigned to in connection to local search SEO. When you type in categories, it will pre-populate the categories for you. It's a good idea to use their pre populated categories first. Let's say it's physio, you'd start typing in physio, rather like, you know when you're on Google and you start typing a word and it does all the predictive text as to what it thinks you're trying to type in? The same thing happens in Google Places. It's a good idea as you're adding these Google listings, to use some of those pre-approved Google categories. You can add some additional ones in there, but it's always good to start off by using those categories.
When you type in something in Google and you do get those drop down boxes, that's a great way to find keywords for yourself because it's Google telling you what it is that it thinks are the most relevant keywords.
