Keyword Research For Google Places Listing
Researching keywords for Google Places listing in Cheltenham
I have been involved with search engine optimization for years and one of the first lessons I learned (the hard way) is keyword selection is very important to a website success. When doing SEO you optimize your website around keywords that you want to rank for, so when someone types one of those keywords into Google, my website will appear in the search results.
Don’t worry though you don’t have to do any SEO to get your Google Places listing, the keywords you choose will be used by Google to determine when to show your Google Places listing to searchers.
Now I am going to show you a simple process to find relevant keywords for your business. For this example let’s say I run sandwiches and snacks bar and looking for my Google places keywords.
Step 1 – First we need to brainstorm keywords, just use common sense as to what someone may use as a search term to find your business. So for my Sandwiches and Snack bar I came up with:
Best sandwiches
Sandwich shop
Sandwiches
Sandwich bar
Buy sandwich
lunch sandwich
This part is really not that difficult and you know (or should know) your business better than anyone. You should also know what part of your business generates the most profit.
In this example I may know that it’s not the sandwiches that make me the most money but the coffees that I sell with them. I may feel that coffee is an important search term that I would like to appear for so I could add in:
Coffee shop
Best coffee
I may also be looking into branching out a little and start offering pastries and cakes as well. I could add in:
Pastries and cakes
coffee and cake
cakes.
By the end of brainstorming you should end up with a list of at least 10 keywords that you think people are using to search for your type of business. I ended up with the following:
Best sandwiches
Sandwich shop
Sandwiches
Sandwich bar
Buy sandwich
lunch sandwich
Coffee shop
Best coffee
Pastries and cakes
coffee and cake
cakes.
Step 2 – What we now need to find out is which of our keywords are the most relevant for our Google places listing.
First you need to check if any of your keywords actually trigger a Google Places results page. Not all keywords will and there is no point in you targeting the ones that don’t. To find out which keywords trigger a places result just type the keyword into Google and see if a Google places result page comes up.
Let’s take the of keyword sandwiches from my list and do a Google search with it; it does not show any places result, the keyword is too broad for Google to associate it with a local search so a standard listing is displayed. Let’s now search for ‘Sandwich bar’, it does return a places listing so I put a tick next to that one.
Do this for your whole list and tick all the keywords that show a places listing.
Step 3 – When you have finished you need to select 5 keywords from the remaining keywords. Google places only give us a few places to actually enter our preferred keywords legitimately so we must choose them carefully.
The easiest method to go about choosing the 5 keywords is to just go by instinct and what makes sense to you. If you have less than 5 keywords left after step 2 just use what you have. Now you have done your keyword research it is time to check out your competition.
Google Places – Analysing Your Competition