How to Read Your Google Local Listing Report

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, Local Search, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines | No Comments

A listing on Google’s local business center provides much more than just a place to enter your company’s information; you just need to know where to look.

Have you viewed your local business center report lately? Do you know what it’s telling you? Below is a sample report, client information redacted, for the past 30 days. From this data you can gather which days were the best for triggering the client’s listing, and which days provided the most clicks.

Sample Google Local Business Center report

Using the date range filter at the top right-hand corner and working backwards in time, you just might be able to identify trends.  For example, Mondays are good for driving traffic, but Wednesdays provide the best click days. Or, generally you spot that the middle of the month seems great for “actions” which means that potential customers are trying to get as many details, driving directions, or visits to your website. You can use this data to tailor your advertising accordingly, and coordinate efforts with your sales team according to which days your customer base is the most active online.

Google’s Local Business Center report also goes on to tell you other exciting tidbits of performance information such as top search queries, and zip codes from IP addresses that searched for driving directions to your location.

Sample Google Local Business Center Report

Knowing this information affords business owners the opportunity to target advertising in extremely effective ways. To begin with, knowing the keywords that triggered your ad are imperative – if they keywords are off, you may need to re-categorize your listing or rewrite your description. The keywords should reflect any PPC or SEO advertising currently underway, and not distract from it. Knowing the zip codes that are searching for your business allows you to expand on advertising in a currently hot area, identify areas trending up, and save money from locations that may not be performing as well.

Your Google local listing report also provides a snapshot of the information that you have entered along the right-hand side of the reports page, and highlights areas where you can beef up details or add media for effect. If you’d like to read more on tricking out your Google local listing and making the most out of this extremely popular (and FREE!) product, read NetSearch Direct’s Top 5 Best Practice Tips.

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Tags: google local business center, google local business center report, google local listing, google local listing report, google maps report, local listings, local listings report, maps report