Webmaster Academy: Connecting with Local Customers

If you’re looking to get found on Google, there’s a good chance your business isn’t just a website, but also a location. 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and 97% of consumers search online for local businesses. Lots of small businesses are looking to the web to boost the visibility of their brick and mortar establishments. We’ll outline a few essential steps to getting started.

It’s important that your business has its own website. Your website should include all the essential information potential and current customers would want to know about your business, such as your history, loyalty programs, unique events, or staff information.

Having a presence on social media is another great way to reach your local community. Social media allows you to engage with your customer base by sharing timely announcements and promotions, listening and responding to customer feedback, and giving customers an easy way to recommend your business to their friends.

A great place to start is with Google’s social network, Google+. With a Google+ business or brand page, you can share all types of information and content with customers, allow them to “+1” your business, and even video chat face-to-face with groups using a Google+ Hangout.

You can also use Google Places for Business to ensure that your business is easily discoverable online. Simply create a free listing for your business, or verify the existing listing already available. That way, when a potential customer searches on Google, Google Maps or Google Maps for Mobile with a phrase related to your service -- for example, [san francisco mexican restaurant] -- they’ll quickly be able to find the most accurate information right in the results. See this video for more info on Google Places:

Your website and Google+ pages are great ways to represent your local business online. If you’re looking for more ideas, the Webmaster Academy has additional information about how to connect with customers online. In next week's blog post, we'll discuss best practices for optimizing your site's discoverability and performance.

Posted by Garen Checkley, Search Quality Team

Webmaster Academy: How Search Works

Many of the questions we get from webmasters boil down to “How does Google work?” What most webmasters are really asking is, how do I get my site to appear in search results? The first step of this answer is that your site needs to be discovered and comprehended by search engines, and understanding the fundamentals of how search works will help with this.

Google has lots of computers that continually visit and analyze web pages it knows about. These computers are collectively known as Googlebot. We give Googlebot an initial set of sites, then send it out to visit those sites. It scans the content, and then follows links to other sites or pages that it finds. It then repeats the process on each page it lands on, and continues to spider out, hence the term "spidering" or "crawling" many use to refer to a search engine's discovery process.

When Googlebot visits a webpage, it downloads and stores a copy (called a “cached” page) to our index. It analyzes each page, noting the words and any other relevant content. Googlebot understands some types of content, like text, better than others, like images or Flash (you can find some ways to make these better understood in Webmaster Academy). In order to perform well when customers search for you, it’s important that Googlebot can access and understand the content of your website.

Each time someone searches on Google, our ranking algorithms draw up a list of relevant webpages from the index of information that Googlebot has saved while “crawling” the web. This list is given back as the Google Search results page. To see if your website is included in Google’s index, you can use the site search operator, restricting search results to your site’s domain. For example a search for [site:youtube.com] would only show results from the website youtube.com.

For a more visual look at Google Search, check out the How Search Works video below:

If you’re interested, there’s a lot more to learn that’ll help you build your online presence at the Webmaster Academy. In our next post, we’ll explain best practices for brick and mortar business owners.

Posted by Garen Checkly, Search Quality Team