Once you have created your business page and filled in all the information possible, Google will send you a letter to the address you provided with a code to validate all the information you have provided.
With this step your company will appear on Google Maps, although it will not be in the first positions on these maps.
Listing in local directories
Although listing in directories (especially directories of dubious quality) is not a recommended practice in terms of SEO, things change when it comes to local SEO.
We will look for quality generic directories (Yelp, Yellow Pages or QDQ) and sector-specific directories.
The important thing is not to leave links (which can be harmful to an SEO strategy), but to register our company with the same NAP (it is important that it is exactly the same) that we have configured on the Google My Business page.
How do we find directories to list our business in?
The easiest way is to analyze where the competition is.
Perform a search for “hotels in Madrid” and analyze the first 5 or 6 results on Google maps one by one.
To do this, you can use a program like ScrapeBox, which is what many professionals use when working on local SEO to analyze the competition.
It is a program with some complexity when it comes to managing it and whose license is relatively expensive for just one project.
We will use the Footprints section of ScrapeBox to narrow down our searches and obtain relevant information.
In case you cannot access ScrapeBox, we can extract the same information from Google's own search box, but by filtering the information.
What we are going to do in both cases is directly search for the address of all philippine area code those companies that we want to analyze.
example “Calle Mayor 27” Barcelona).
In addition to specific directories, as I said before, there are also quality directories that, in addition to being more reliable, are much more effective when it comes to returning valuable results and information.
Mentions and reviews
Have you noticed the little yellow stars that appear in local results on Google?
These ratings or reviews written by customers, which will be visible in the form of yellow stars once a business has 5 ratings, are a factor that Google also takes into account when positioning companies locally.
Try to get your customers to leave positive reviews about your business.
The more reviews you get and the better your customers give you, the more it will help you rank high in local search results.
But be careful, the stars of a person with little participation are not worth the same as those of a Local Guide level 7, 8, 9 or 10.
The ratings left by these highly engaged users on Google Maps are much more valuable than those left by a user who does not reach those levels.
Getting reviews from people with a high Local Guide level will help us position our business much better on the maps.
Here is a link to the official Google page that explains how levels, points and badges work within the Local Guide program .