Is your business moving to a new location? If so, your online presence must move with you.
For most businesses, a digital move isn’t always as well-thought-out as a physical move, which can have a detrimental impact on local SEO. Having outdated information on the web can lead to lost revenue and severely deteriorate your online rankings as misdirected customers leave negative reviews.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the must-dos of a successful digital relocation.
Before updating your listings, you’ll want to update your website with your new address and contact details. Doing so gives you credibility and ensures any changes to your business listings won’t be flagged as suspicious by Google’s algorithm.
Your address and phone number may show up on many different pages on your site. To make sure the site reflects the change of premises and update any directions listed on your site, here are a few common places to look at:
There may be other instances of your phone number or address or mentions of a previous town location buried within the content of pages. To help you find those, you can perform a “site:” search in Google.
Using Google, type the proper variation of this into the search bar “site:yourwebsiteurl.com ‘old-address’. This will bring up any pages that Google knows about that have the address on them. Do this for any phone numbers as well, just replace the ‘old address’ with your phone number.
If the address is in the footer of the site, however, all the pages will be returned by Google which will make it impossible to tell if something in the content of the pages still needs updating. So the site search can be something that you do after you update the more easily located information.
As well, if you have any schema code on the site, you will need to update the address in there as well.
You can find out if your website has address or phone number information in hidden schema code by looking in the source of the html. Schema does not display on the front end of the site and if you are unsure of how you can check for that, then you can use this schema validation tool by Google. Enter the url of your website and Google will return any schema located on that page.
Then you’ll need to find out where in your CMS (like WordPress) the schema data has been entered. Usually, the schema is populated across all pages on your website from one source item, and making the change in that one spot will update all the pages. search, in the consideration and decision stages of buying.
Lastly, it’s also important to inform your customers of the move beforehand. A “Hey, we’re moving!” announcement on your home page or a blog post talking about the move will do the trick.
If you sell products online, it is important to have specific types of videos so that your customers can get a sense of your products.
This video shows your product in use, giving your customers a chance to see what they are buying and how it works before they buy it.
This video shows off your retail location and what customers can expect when they walk in, and where they might find your products.
In this video, you want to show off your friendly team so customers can know who to expect when they click on Driving directions in Google Maps.
Maintaining your Auto Inventory and being at the top of your Local Search game is critical. These 3 types of videos will help your customers get a sense of what kind of dealership you are and what they can expect from your inventory as they are searching.
This video shows off your dealership and what it is like when they reach their destination from Driving Directions in Google in Maps. Show potential customers a general walkthrough of your show floor and service.
Even though car models frequently change, over 70% of shoppers say online video has helped them learn more about an auto product they intend to buy (Google). So creating short videos of your best auto inventory to highlight can have a big impact.
If you have services to highlight, have your service team do a quick video that goes over the types of services you offer at your dealership.
Managing Locations at scale is critical to growing your business, and keeping your content relevant and up to date by posting 1x week is paramount for consumers today to evaluate your business or products.
Creating consistent content, then scheduling this content ahead of time, allows you to focus on running your business, not just creating content like posts and photos. If you are an agency that runs multiple accounts, you also know the challenges of logging in and out of multiple Business Profile accounts on Google and keeping track of schedules in spreadsheets. This is why a SaaS automation platform for video scheduling can really scale your business. dbaPlatform is currently the only Local presence Business Profile Automation application software that automates video scheduling.
Remember to schedule frequently. The best way to do that is to create a publishing calendar and make sure that you set a schedule to add new content weekly, monthly or quarterly, depending on your buying seasons. HubSpot has some great ideas for general marketing strategies for videos and many of them can be followed with Business Profile.
dbaPlatform has built in the same requirements as Business Profile on Google Search and Maps. Here are the guidelines to prepare your video files.
Important: Your videos show up on your Business Profile only after you verify your Business Profile.
Make sure your videos comply with Google’s current Photos & Videos policy. These policies are updated frequently, and they were last updated on May 10, 2021.
If you are already registered for dbaPlatform, you can log into your account and use this functionality under the Photos & Videos Tab.
When you add your content to dbaPlatform, the same guidelines apply, and if you don’t follow them, you will get an error message. Make sure you check your files before you start uploading.
Here is a link to a helpful knowledge base article. If you need more assistance in uploading your files or troubleshooting, there is an in-app chat ready to answer your questions.
Check out the Business Profile Video Scheduler How to Video for More:
dbaPlatform is the only SaaS platform in the Local SEO automation industry that offers video scheduling. This is a critical time saver for any company looking to capitalize on the existing impact that Video content has on Google Search during the customer buying process. As Google refines their Cloud Video AI we will see Video become even more impactful in search. It is worth the time and effort and there are many great platforms out there to help edit your content and make it easy to create authentically searchable, convertible videos ready for Business Profile.
Book a demo with our sales department today to see how you can scale your business with our Video Scheduler and our many other features Business Profile features. You can enhance your business’s relevance to Google and show up right when your customers are looking for you.