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Banding Together
Posted on January 1st, 2010 View Comments
Is your local retail business going well? Some of your (not ‘really competing’) neighbours doing worse?I wrote a piece last year about why you might want to help out those who you might consider competitors. I’ve just seen first hand what can happen when a company’s neighbour goes out of business: a much more serious competitor can move in.
My local sandwich shop, a small independently owned business has been serving baguettes, salads and paninis for over 5 years. Later this month a sandwich-shop chain is opening up in place of a cafe, just three doors away. They should have them beaten on price, unless the new shop gets aggressive and goes after their loyal customer base of office workers from around the area. As it stands they’ll attract business just on the basis of curiosity.
Now is the time for the little guy to raise their game, whether they broaden the menu, encourage loyalty (the chain already has a loyalty discount card) and raise their service level: offer delivery, take pre-orders – all the things the chain isn’t willing to do.
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Local listings for local people
Posted on April 30th, 2009 View CommentsThe what, why and how of getting in the Google Local search results
Now Google are beefing up the importance of ‘local’ worldwide it’s time get serious about your listing.
Go to google.com and do a search for your business type, e.g. ‘Tackle shop’. Are you getting the ‘Local 10 pack’ (see image below)? If you’re not getting amongst local results at the top of the page, try it with a ‘geographic modifier’ – the name of your town/city.
A local 10 pack
If you are seeing local results then Google deems those keywords indicative of a business that people are interested in local listings for and that they have results available for. Did you come up in those listings? If yes, you may still need to ‘claim your listing’ if you weren’t the person that entered it into Google Local Business Center – jump to the ‘claiming your listing’ section below. If your business doesn’t come up, search for your business name ‘Fred’s Tackle’ along with the name of your town: ‘Fred’s Tackle Brighton’ should do. If that finds you, and displays your details along with a map, then you may still need to claim your listing (and you clearly have other work to do too in optimising for keywords!)
Entering your Google Local listing, or claiming an existing one
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