The importance of having positive reviews for your business go beyond having a good image and building trust. While those are extremely important factors in of themselves, there are also search engine optimization implications. The biggest search engine as you know is Google, so it stands to reason that Google reviews would be the most important in the realm of SEO. Yelp and other review sites certainly can’t hurt, but if you have a business listing through Google, populated with positive reviews that have been left with verifiable gmail accounts, you can bet that will have a positive influence on your rankings.
Many of you already know this much and that is what brought you to this article. The process for creating, claiming and verifying a Google+ Local page is straightforward enough, but if you’ve never done it before you may be wondering whether a brick and mortar location is required to start acquiring reviews. The answer? Sort of. As long as you have an address you can receive mail in the general area you want to be found in, you can still have a verified Google+ Local page without revealing the address of your home or remote office to the whole world.
The process is actually fairly simple. When setting up your Google+ Local Business page, when prompted simply check the box that states “I deliver goods and services to customers at their location” and uncheck the box that says “I also serve customers at my business location”. This will hide your address from the public, but will still allow Google to verify that you are indeed in that location. It will then give you the option to select the radius in which you serve clients or customers whether that’s 25 miles or 200 miles from the address you use. Once you receive Google’s verification postcard in the mail and enter that verification code into your account, within a day or two your Google+ Local page will be ready to receive all of the rave reviews you can handle!
Need help acquiring reviews from your clients, patients or customers? Contact New Wine Web Design today to help build an internet marketing and reputation management strategy!
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (5/10/2016) mjmonty/a> (Flickr)