It’s Time To Start Loading Up GMB With Images!
We live in an age where sharing images is common place. For business already utilising platforms including Instagram, TripAdvisor and Yelp it is difficult to overestimate just how important quality images can be. Even now though, things have just been taken up a notch.
As the saying goes ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and the ability to visually represent your business in terms of products and services offers the chance to give potential customers a valuable insight into what they will be getting for their money before they even make contact with you.
With the recently revamped Google My Business dashboard offering greater prominence to images, it is clearly more important than ever to do all that you can to ensure that your business looks its best at all times.
To help back up this theory, a recent study makes for some interesting reading.
How important are Google My Business photos to local search performance?
As part of a recent Google My Business Insights Study, the insights of almost 50,000 businesses in 36 industries across 4 countries were studies to see if any common data streams could be found and the one below stands out from the crowd – Businesses which upload more photos to their GMB listings receive more clicks, calls and direction requests than businesses that don’t.
By ensuring that you continue to upload quality images on a regular basis along with following the tops below, you can take large strides towards ensuring the maximum levels of visibility for your business:
- Choosing The Correct Categories: Google provides an extensive list of categories from which you can choose. Simply choose the most relevant option from the available choices as your primary category and then choose as many as you can that relate to your products/services.
- Use GMB As A Social Media Channel: You can make your listing more attractive by adding posts, videos, images etc which can be posted through the GMB dashboard. Turning GMB into a Social Media channel, the most recent posts will be added to the bottom of your GMB listing during search results and images may also appear in Google Image search results.
- Encourage As Many Reviews As Possible: It is not possible to overemphasise the importance of reviews. Simply ask your customers to review and rate on your listing. Online reviews play a crucial role in helping to separate competing businesses and the chances are, the more positive reviews on your account, the higher your listing may rank and the greater confidence new customers will have that your services are reputable.
Further Information
If you’d like to speak to us regarding any of our services, including our online marketing services, please give us a call on 01883 372488 or contact us via Facebook and we’ll be happy to talk you through your options.
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Are You Ready For Voice Searches?
It’s almost impossible to miss the fact that more and more devices allow you to literally ask them questions. If you have ever asked Siri for the next showing of an upcoming film or asked any other device to answer a question for you, you have already taken your first steps into ‘voice searching’.
The stats below are quite the eye-opener.
Here are some voice search stats*:
- Nearly 40 million Americans now own a smart speaker
- By 2020, 30 percent of web browsing will be screenless
- 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches by 2020
- Everyday household items are the most common voice search-based purchases
- 20 percent of mobile queries are voice search, says Google
- Most smart-speaker owners conduct local voice searches
- Google’s AI learned how to be more conversational by consuming 2,865 romance novels
A Growing Market
Clearly, the manufacturers of smartphones have been aware of the power of voice searches for some time. However, the addition of a huge variety of voice-activated personal devices to the UK market has resulted in a real explosion in the need for optimisation for voice search results.
Even if you are still wondering how this may affect you, check out the list below and see how many of these devices you are aware of being used either personally or by your customers.
- iPhone (Siri)
- Android Smart Phones
- Tablets (iPads and Android)
- Microsoft Cortana
- Amazon Echo/Alexa
- + Many more
Due to the variety of different devices utilising voice searching as part of their key methods of delivering results, you can be sure that each device will put its own unique spin on the results they provide.
For example – Asking a Google-powered device where the nearest Chinese restaurant is will see them taking Answer Boxes into consideration when giving voice search results. However, asking Alexa where the nearest Italian restaurant is, will very likely provide you with search results based upon postcodes.
Unlike typical SEO for a website which focuses on the search keyword phrases which are known to be typed into a computer, voice search is different.
Far more likely to take on a tone that is conversational and natural, we have a few tips to help you get a head start with your voice search results.
- Add more Q&A pages to your site
- Long tail keywords have never been more important
- The same can be said for page an article headings
- Locally based content can be key
- Cut to the chase – answering questions that your customers may ask should always take prominence on your page
- Don’t forget that voice search is also typically mobile and often locally focused
Further Information
If you’d like to speak to us regarding how we can help you generate online reviews, give us a call on 01883 372488 or contact us via Facebook and we’ll be happy to talk you through your options.
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Why Are Products & Services Following Me Around The Internet???
Have you found that a product or service that you have looked at on the internet previously seems to be following you around the internet? For example, a shirt that you have been thinking of buying keeps appearing on another site, or a holiday that you have just been looking at keeps popping up on Facebook?
Thanks to an ingenious bit of technology both Google and Facebook offer the ideal way to keep your products and services in the minds of people who have visited your website. This is known as remarketing.
How Does Remarketing Work?
Facebook offers the ideal way to automatically show the right products/services to people who have already expressed interest on your website, in your app or elsewhere on the Internet. This process has been designed to continue working for you for as long as you want – finding the correct people for each product and always using up-to-date pricing and availability.
Introducing The Facebook Pixel
The Facebook pixel (and Google Analytics) is the crucial bit of coding that will allow you to reach your customers and contacts on Facebook.
The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions that people take on your website.
You can use the pixel to:
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Make sure that your ads are shown to the right people. Find new customers or people who have visited a specific page or taken a desired action on your website.
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Drive more sales. Set up automatic bidding to reach people who are more likely to take an action that you care about, such as making a purchase.
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Measure the results of your ads. Better understand the impact of your ads by measuring what happened as a direct result.
Once you’ve set up the Facebook pixel, the pixel will fire when someone takes an action on your website. Examples of actions include adding an item to their shopping basket or making a purchase. The pixel receives these actions, or “events”, which you can view on your Facebook pixel page in Events Manager.
From there, you’ll be able to see the actions that your customers take and have options to reach those customers again through future Facebook ads.
Further Information
If you’d like to speak to us regarding remarketing, give us a call on 01883 372488 today and we’ll be happy to talk you through your options.
