Insights for Local Business Owners
If your client is a local business owner, it's likely that Google plays a role in helping customers find them. And we're not just talking about their website — thanks to Google Maps and Google Search, they may also be getting a lot of online traffic to their business listing. You've probably seen one of these listings before. A potential customer does a search on Google.com or in Google Maps, comes across a business listing, clicks on it to see reviews and details, and then gets directions to the location.
Now there is a way for local business owners to get a better understanding of how customers are finding their business. Did they search for "new car" or "test drive" to get to the listing for the showroom? What happens to traffic to the new showroom when your client starts advertising in the local paper? Do they drive miles for your client’s service? With this information, you'd be able to make better informed planning decisions on how to drive more traffic to your client’s listing and attract more customers.
We have launched a new dashboard feature in the Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc). The LBC is a free tool that enables business owners to control the content of their business listings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps. All they have to do is claim their listing in the LBC and go through a quick verification process to get access to the following kinds of data and share it with you:
- Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
- Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business' website or requested driving directions to the business.
- Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing
- Post codes where driving directions come from: Which post codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.
Encourage your clients to sign into the LBC today. We've already populated the dashboards for claimed listings with data from the last 30 days. All the data we share through the dashboard will be anonymous and aggregated, to protect the privacy of Google users.
We're really excited to be able to open up this data to local business owners. We think you and your client’s will really get a lot out of this new information.
To learn more about accessing and using the dashboard, take a look at this video and then visit the Lat Long Blog for a more in-depth overview.