Get Your Massage Business Ranked Highly with Google Places

by Eric Brown
BodyworkBiz

It's natural to turn to previous purchasers for help in making buying decisions. With Amazon, that community is various book buffs. With massage and bodywork businesses, that group of advisors is local bodywork consumers.

Web visitors won't feel confident that a business will give unbiased guidance on their web site. They're not stupid. They seek feedback from other individuals for the truth. They know that customers who have purchased previously will happily share their frank thoughts about a business they've used and will truly give them the good, bad and ugly.

In this article I am going to focus on a unique kind of review website: The 'map site'. There are three in particular we should consider. StatsCan, the government branch responsible for census data in Canada, recently reported (2009) that 52% of Canadians engage in online window shopping. It's likely that consumers in other places in the world have similar tendencies.

The search engines know this and have put a lot of money into indexing and ranking local businesses. Type a phrase like 'massage Atlanta' into Google, for example, and you will get a results page with local business listed. Do a search for a local service right now. You can see how the results for local businesses are tied directly into Google's map functionality.

You can plainly see that these listings are given special prominence on the search results page. This is important for you as a local business. Getting listed in Google's local results is surprisingly easy. For the most part it's a matter of filling out your listing fully and soliciting a few reviews.

And it doesn't necessarily take a long time to get shown in those local search listings.

Your company name appears and is hyperlinked to your website. You can see that the phone number is likely displayed beside your website URL. And what's really important is the links to reviews for that business. People are dying to find out what other clients think about you, so they click to read reviews.

Take a look for yourself. Type 'massage [your city]' or 'restaurants [your city]' and see what comes up in the search results. When you click a review link you will see a Google Places listing. This listing contains information that Google has found throughout the web. If you look through that business page a little you'll see the review section.

If you claim the listing as belonging to you, you can edit it, correct any mistakes and make your listing more appealing to help potential customers to make the decision to make call to your business.

Fill out the business details completely in the listing to get people's attention. Reviews left by your clients are invaluable for strengthening your credibility and a little work on your part will ensure that your reviews reflect positively on you and your business.

Article submitted Sunday, October 02, 2011 & read 17 times.

Eric Brown has been a massage therapist for over 20 years. This massage business expert is currently the director of BodyworkBiz, World Massage Conference, and Relax to the Max, as well as co-founder of Massage Therapy Radio. He has recently released Thermal Palms, a soft alternative to hot stone massage. He is a respected massage educator, teaches internationally at massage conferences and contributes regularly to major massage magazines and trade publications.

https://profiles.google.com/bodyworkbiz

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