Scott Services: A Local SEO Citation You Never Knew You Had

Thursday 21 February 2019

A Local SEO Citation You Never Knew You Had

When it comes to building citations, most local SEO’s will either build them from a list, starting with aggregator’s and move onto more niche local sites, or you can use a submission service to take care of this for you.

The pain point with local business citations begins when the business makes a change relating to Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP), removal of a service that affects their primary category or modifying opening hours. If you are not using a listing management service you have to log into each site and update the details.

Then you have to wait for the page to be found and crawled again by Googlebot for these updated details to start filtering through, with some lower tier sites taking months to be crawled again.

But what if there was a Local SEO citation that:

Updated NAP automatically
Updated images automatically
Updated categories automatically
Updated opening hours automatically
Updated services, menus or products automatically
Displayed your Google Posts
Was powered by Google

Now that would be an amazing citation!

You already have this available to you inside your Google My Business listing, all you need to do is enable it.

Your Google My Business Citation

Okay you got me, this is not a directory citation, but it is still a citation in the technical sense; maybe more web2.0.

In June 2017 Google My Business launched their single page website builder which is integrated with the GMB listing. It is intended to provide small businesses without a website the ability to create their own single page, mobile-friendly website on its own subdomain within “business.site”.

And before you pew pew these websites, kind in mind, for a small business they are working pretty well.

Position Tracking of a Google My Business Website

Since its initial launch, GMB has added service menus, food menus, product inventory and Google posts automatically to the site, so the page grows as you update your GMB listing.

And unlike some citations (non-promoted), they actually drive traffic.

Google My Business Website Traffic

Has this sparked your interest yet?

Enabling Your New Citation

The beauty of this citation is you only need to enable it. If you have properly optimized your Google My Business Listing the only additional thing you need to do is pick a theme and add your page content; all the additional content from your GMB listing is pulled through automatically. Here is how to do that:

Create / Enable

Select website in your GMB listings navigation.

Select Website in Google My Business Listings Navigation

This action starts the creation process.

Pick your:

Edit:

Primary Button – Call Now, Book
Headline
Description
Summary Header
Page Copy (don’t forget to add a link to your main site)

Publish:

Your new domain will be your business name, once you hit publish you have an opportunity to edit this, like adding a location or service into this.

Publish your Google My Business Citation

And no you do not want to “Buy Domain” this is intended as a citation.

In the early days of creating a GMB website, your main URL was replaced at this stage. They have since fixed this, but I still do a double check out of habit to make sure my actual URL has not been replaced.

Automatic Updates

When a user adds a Google Post to their GMB listing, the post is automatically added to the website. And information that gets updated on the GMB page – menu, service, times, tel number – is automatically updated on the single page website. You don’t need to tell it to do this; equally you cannot turn this off, because they are connected automatically.

Google Posts

Google Posts Automatically Added to Page

FYI: Your Google Posts are also indexed on their own page.

Service Menu:

When you update services or prices, these update automatically.

Restaurant Menu:

Product Inventory:

Say whaaat?

Glad you are paying attention, yes product inventory.

This option is currently in Beta and not yet rolled out. In a nutshell, you can add products to your GMB listing which appear within a product tab/carousel in Knowledge Panel.

Business Info:

NAP Details Automatically Updated on Page