Verify Your Google Local Business Listing

The following is a transcription of a telephone interview I did about verifying your Google Local Listing.

Getting into Google Local is very important for local businesses. Oftentimes local businesses understand it is important and they look to see if they are already listed with Google. More than likely their business is already in Google Local, however, the business is not verified until the business owner goes through the process of registering with Google Local and then verifying the account.

It’s ery important to verify your Google Local listing. Simply allowing Google to go out and find our listing in other places, such as yellowpages.com for example, or other business listings, is simply not efficient to rank well. Google puts more emphasis on the sites that are truly verified by a human that they can authenticate to be real. Another important advantage of verifying your Google Local listing is that if you don’t, someone else could.

It is possible and it has happened before that unscrupulous business owners could actually go in and verify your business. In that case they would change the phone number to their business listing, change the address to their business listing, and so forth. You would completely lose out on that business listing. Go and check in Google Local. Do a search for your business in your city.

If you are a flower shop for example search flower shop in Topeka. You will find more than likely your business in there. If you haven’t listed it yet or verified it, it needs to be verified. When you click on the listing you will see a link where you, as a business owner can click and begin the process to register your business officially with Google local business listings.

This is important for two reasons. If you don’t register your listing and verify it, Google will not usually rank it as well. Also, there is always a chance that someone else could “steal” your listing and substitute their phone number and other contact info for yours.

Go verify your Google local listing!