Google Business Profile and local search
If your customers come to a physical door, the map pack above the search results matters more than everything below it, and it's decided by three things most businesses ignore.
Consistency, completeness, reviews
Your name, address and phone number have to be identical everywhere they appear, character for character, because every mismatch is a signal that Google can't be sure which business you are. The profile has to be complete: hours, categories, attributes, services, photographs that aren't eight years old. And reviews have to keep arriving, with replies to all of them. An excellent business with a neglected profile loses to a mediocre one that maintains theirs, and that gap closes in weeks rather than months.
Multiple locations without splitting yourself
Three venues do not need three websites. They need one site with a page per location, each with its own profile, address, hours and genuinely local content. All of them feed one domain's authority instead of dividing it three ways. The most common mistake we see is a separate domain per branch, which guarantees that none of them ranks.
Common questions
Can you get reviews for me?
We build the system that asks for them and the templates to reply, which nearly always multiplies the rate they arrive at. We don't buy them: Google detects purchased reviews and the penalty is worse than the problem you started with.
How do I handle a bad review?
Reply publicly, briefly, without arguing and without disclosing anything private about the customer. The reply is not for the person who complained; it's for the next hundred people who read it.
Keep reading
- Search engine optimisationRanking first on Google isn't luck and it isn't a bigger budget. It's architecture, content and patience, applied in the language each customer is actually searching in.
- Conversion rate optimisationDoubling your traffic is slow and expensive. Doubling the proportion of it that buys is often a fortnight's work, and nobody does it first.
- Content and keyword strategyPublishing more is not a strategy. Most sites already have too many pages and too few that answer a question somebody is actually asking.
- Restaurants and hospitality groupsIn hospitality almost everything is decided on the Google map, two hundred metres from the door and fifteen minutes before lunch.