Google Launches new Local Business Schema Support

On April 8, 2014, Google implemented two different support features for Local SEO.  The first is support for Schema tags to help with your local business listings.  Schema tags are markup you put into your website code to display information such as phone numbers and events.

Four types of phone numbers are currently supported:

• Customer service
• Technical support
• Billing support
• Bill payment

The tags also allow you to indicate what type of phone number it is – toll free, for the hearing impaired, global or specific countries.

In addition, you can specify other categories of phone numbers, but they are not currently appearing in Google’s Search Engines Results Pages (SERPS).

Are your Local Business Listings Accessible to Googlebot?

Do we have Local Business SEO?  Are we going to be indexed by Google?  Do we have the correct information in our local business pages?

Today Google is helping SEO’s by creating recommendations about the best way to build location pages.  These recommendations include desktop as well as mobile optimized sites – providing a better user experience for its audience.

As a marketing company specializing in local business SEO services, our clients ask us these questions often. Working with Google’s recommendations, we help our clients by understanding what Googlebot wants to see in its indexing.  Moreover, we help our clients be found by other “people” – the users of Googlebot.

Googlebot’s new indexing structure includes:

• Crawling
• Indexing
• Visual Suggestions/Layout
• New Structured Data Markup Guidelines

This will not replace Places for Business in Google currently, rather, it will be another opportunity for your business to be found in Google.  These new recommendations will also give SEO’s the ability to better market individual branch locations. When Google is able to correctly identify your pages, it is more likely to return those results to searchers looking for your business.  If you need help with Local Business SEO or would like to learn more about the best way to organize your business locally, contact us today.