6 Things You Should Check On Google for your Business

During our last presentation for DM3 Institute, we realized that many people do not Google their business to see how they rank and how they are displayed. That may not be a sound strategy if your customers are Googling your name before visiting your website.

Today we will give you 6 things to check in order to impress people on search engines before they visit your website.

The idea is to be sure that people will get the best opinion about you, before they actually enter your website.

1- Google your company name in a new incognito windows

Do not forget that Google is actually customizing its results for you. It means that whenever you Google your company name from your normal windows, you’ll get links that most of people won’t have. Do not think that just because you see your website rank first when you Google it that other people will get the same experience. Try it yourself, use Google Incognito to anonymously check how your website ranks if someone would Google it for the first time.

2- Check What Google Displays for Your Website

So once you found your results on Google Incognito-hopefully you are ranking first- you have to check what Google is displaying:

Title: Check that a properly written title is displayed
Meta description: Check that your description is displayed properly -in our case there was an issue we had to fix-
Google+: Make sure you have positive reviews (The more reviews the better) and the right link to your Google My Business Page
Location: Most of the time it will be displayed either because you linked it to your My Business Page onGoogle+ or added the proper schema.org html
Sitelink: It’s not something you decide to display, but Google allows you via Google Webmaster Tool to remove some that you don’t want to showcase
Extra Links: If your website is properly indexed, you’ll find all the other links here

3- Check that your Google + Page is Well Displayed

Even if you don’t decide to display this, it would be a plus if you can get it. It’s a Google+ feature and the more you take up of the search screen with relevant information about you, the easier and more comfortable your clients will feel when learning about you.

4- Check External Links

So now it’s time to check a bit more which websites rank when someone searches your name on Google. In the case above we see:

Slideshare
Twitter
Linkedin
Facebook

Even if you don’t have a huge community behind each of these social media channels, make sure that you properly enter your company name, description and info in all these channels. So if for some reasons someone click one of your socuak pages he’ll find all useful information and a link to your website.

5- Check your images

Same here, make sure that:

You named properly all your images
Use the right <alt> and <title> description

Don’t forget that images are also a good way to showcase your portfolio and more. If you don’t want this to happen you can still use a robot.txt to stop Google from displaying your image folder

6- Get Your Company Listed on Google Maps