How to Get Your Business Information Discovered on Google

It is very important to ensure that your customers can easily find important information about your online business on search engines.  Help your business get found quickly and easily on Google Search, Maps, and Google+ with these recommendations.

Searchers could have many different queries about your business, such as:

• Phone Numbers,
• Business Location, and
• Opening Hours.

This information is typically found on your business website’s “Contact Us” or location page.  When this page is optimized, Google will be more likely to use that information for searchers looking for your business.

Specify Your Customer Service Numbers to Google

Google is making it easier than ever for customers to find company phone numbers.  National phone numbers are easily displayed for customers to contact the business when a website is properly structured.

With Google’s structured data markup embedded on your website, you can specify preferred phone numbers.  You can also indicate if the phone number is for hearing impaired, specific regions or countries, or it is toll-free. The newly released Corporate Contact markup currently supports four different types of corporate phone numbers:

• Customer service
• Technical support
• Billing support
• Bill payment

Add structured markup to your website to increase your business’ searchability.

Build a Location Page for Local Business Searches

Many people turn to Google to look for recommendations for local business websites.  Make sure that your business is at the top of that list by making your location page easily accessible and understandable to Googlebot.

A Location Page usually has an address of the business, a phone number, opening hours, and sometimes a list of services or departments available.  When building an optimized location page on your website, it is important to take the following steps to ensure that it is easy for Googlebot to crawl:

• Have each location’s or branch’s information accessible on separate webpages.
• Allow Googlebot to discover and crawl the location pages.
• The location information should be presented in an easy-to-understand format.
• Use schema.org structured data markup.
• Build a smartphone-optimized location page using Google’s recommendations.

Visit Google’s guidelines for building websites for local businesses to check that you have all the correct information.  Also, check out Google’s new structured data markup guidelines to help Google index pages more accurately.

Another quick and easy way to update your business’ contact information is by using Places for Business.  You can update the information displayed on Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph, and Adwords Campaigns about your business.

For more information regarding Google’s recommendations for surfacing business information, please refer to these full guidelines.