As a business owner in the year 2014, you most likely have a Google+ page. If you’re enrolled in the Prospect Genius Starter or Core program, then you definitely do. But the simple act of having a listing isn’t enough if you want to truly optimize your lead generation.
To get the most out of your Google+ page, you’ll have to become an active participant. In this blog post, we’ll cover two of the easiest ways you can optimize your listing: adding photos and getting reviews.
Add Personality With Photos
Adding photos to your listing will have a number of immediate benefits for your business.
First, any prospective customers who see your listing will instinctively view your business as more legitimate if the page is populated with lots of unique, professional photos. After all, it’s no secret that people respond to images and visual aids more strongly than they do to plain text.
Second, Google values diverse, interactive content over one-dimensional content. If your listing is populated with photos, videos, and links, then your rankings will improve.
Finally, the act of adding photos isn’t something that has to remain exclusive to your Google+ page. You should absolutely add these photos to all of your social media accounts, including Facebook and Twitter. Unique photos will bring more personality to your company’s listings, which would otherwise be virtually indistinguishable from similar companies’ listings.
Whether they feature your team of technicians, your company truck, or your own family, photos add a face to your business’s name.
Get Rewarded for Your Reviews
We’ve written extensively about the benefits of customer reviews from a marketing standpoint. (We have several blog posts about the topic, which you can view here.) The value boils down to how important it is to showcase your previously satisfied customers as a way of convincing prospects that you’re worth their investment.
But did you know that there’s also a technical advantage to having more customer reviews on your listing? Google’s search algorithms highly value Google+ pages that have lots of customer reviews. Therefore, if your page has lots of legitimate, relevant reviews, it will be ranked higher on search results pages.
Keep in mind, Google+ isn’t the only important online platform for customer reviews. Yelp is equally important for Bing users, as Bing pulls up Yelp reviews in its search results for businesses. That’s why smart business owners will try to spread their reviews around to a handful of different outlets instead of putting them all in one place.
Prospect Genius recommends collecting five to ten reviews on Google+, then another five to ten on Yelp, before moving on to other platforms like Facebook and Citysearch.
Add Our Free Review Feature to Your Site
If it sounds like a difficult task to cultivate reviews and spread them to specific websites, don’t worry: Prospect Genius has a solution. We have a free review feature that you can add right to your LeadTrax™ site. We don’t have an algorithm that arbitrarily blocks or filters out reviews, which means all of the reviews that you want to appear on your site will appear (and the ones you don’t want to appear won’t).
How does it work? Customers click on the “Leave Us a Review!” button displayed on your LeadTrax site. If a customer leaves a positive review (a rating of 4 or 5), they will be prompted to spread that review around on social media outlets like Google+, Facebook, and Yelp. If someone gives you a rating of 3 or below, they will be thanked for their review and won’t be prompted to take any further action. That means you get to put your best foot forward on your own website in addition to spreading your positive reviews across various online platforms. Two birds with one stone!
No More Excuses!
You have a camera or smartphone for taking pictures. Now you have a review feature on your LeadTrax site for cultivating and sharing reviews. You officially have no more excuses for keeping a lackluster Google+ page! Get started today.
