How can Google help your local business?

You are the owner of a small business and you need more exposure? The location of your shop is difficult to find?You have traffic on your website but few visits from customers? If it is the case, Google can help your business, not only for the ranking of your website, but also to help locating your website. We all know by now that the new algorithm of Google is changing the way SEO works, but it is giving a bigger place to locations applications of Google like Maps,Business, Places, and Google + . So what are the advantages of using these applications for your business?

Nowadays, even if the internet is opening the door for customers to shop anywhere in the world, a majority of them are still shopping locally. The human factor is still a very important component of any transaction. With the rise of social media, local businesses have been presented the opportunity to advertise in their local community, but on a media that covers a worldwide population. Moreover, with the increasing number of smartphones, a customer can just do an internet research wherever he or she is, and locate the product needed near him or her in a few seconds. Google is the main provider of localisation for businesses, thanks to its application Google Map. And let say the customer is literally next door and need your product, but you are not showing up on Google Map... The customer is going somewhere else.

Google is offering a full suite of application to help developing small businesses like Google Map, Google  + Business, and Google Places. On top of advertising your shop on the map, the combination of these applications will give you a complete solution for local business: location, map, reviews, access to social media etc. It is a matter of giving your customer the right information. If we step back and look at the bigger picture, the web scale, what is going to change with you using these applications?

It will help your SEO. Being local will help the ranking of your website. Hummingbird gave a lot of importance to Google local applications, and using them will be a good tactic for your SEO. Moreover, your online reputation will increase and, with the good community management behind, it will help grow your customer basis. On the local scale, your business will have a platform that is mobile friendly. Because the truth is, most of local research are done on mobile devices, through mobile applications and are linked to the GPS of the device. 

To conclude, it is clear that Google will help your business with all the local application that the search engine is offering. Some other company like Yelp, Foursquares,and Yellowpages also offer local business applications to locate businesses (for Yelp and Foursquares, it is mainly restaurants). Using these applications will help your SEO, increase your exposure and increase your brand reputation. So advertise online to be more local, and take it EZ.