To start let’s clarify what a Point of Interest (POI) is. A POI is a broad term, it encompasses any stakeholder that your business might find important. For service providers it could be their customers, while for brands it might be their networks. In most cases we are referring to physical points of sales. For example Deliveroo’s POI could be restaurants who use their delivery application, while for Schwarzkopf it would be hair salons who carry their products.
Regardless of who your POI is, what remains the same is the need for these POI’s to improve their discoverability, which in turn will bring benefits to the brand as a whole. In a previous article we explored local SEO and discovered how Google Business Profiles are the new and improved Yellow Pages. Today we look at the customer journey to understand how your POIs can take control, stand out and drive conversion.
So without further ado, how can you boost your POI’s discoverability so they get found across all the online channels in 4 steps?
Launch a presence management strategy
When customers search on Google, the GBP listings serves as a first impression. Therefore, it is crucial for your POI’s to be an administrator of these listing. It only takes a quick search to see whether a listing exists for the POI, if it does simply claim it, otherwise create one and go through a verification process.
Google has revealed that 84% of Google Business Profile listings have at least 1 error. PowerAPI being a Google Partner, can help facilitate the retrieval and verification process.
Join forces with your POI’s to optimize the GBP, it is a small time investment for a large ROI. The more optimized and regularly updated the listings are, the higher ranking in search results.
Here is a checklist of what to consider:
Add external links such as website, booking, appointments, social medias. If you have created a landing page for your POI’s “shoot 2 birds with one stone” by increasing the prominence of your POI's GBP there will be more traffic to the services you provide or your brand awareness.
While it’s likely that your POI’s will edit this information themselves, you might want to have an overview of its use and results, the good news is with PowerAPI a brand or service provider can manage multiple locations at time.
GBP takes into account the rating of the business, and how active a business is in answering its reviews, sharing posts, and events. A POI can share posts about their offers, events, news, testimonials and much more.
Being active will automatically tell the algorithm to rank the business higher. As a brand like Schwarzkopf you could broadcast a post across all your POI’s announcing a new hair product, while Deliveroo could broadcast a new discount code.
Reviews are one of the top 3 considerations in SEO ranking, the better the rating, number of reviews and response rate the more trustworthy the GBP will be. They are so important that PowerAPI actually built a whole complementary tool to best manage them, boost reviews and outweigh negative reviews, read about it here.
If you are wondering what about all the other platforms that your POI’s have to manage? You are right third-party sites generate 28 times more contacts than websites, so it is crucial for them to have a presence on multiple platforms.
Thankfully, there are solutions in the market that have already integrated publishing platforms such as search engines, social media, maps and navigators and even voice assistants.
A change in information (address, website, opening hours, photos, promotions, etc.) can be broadcasted on 25+ publishers with a click.
To conclude:
Presence management can seem like a big feat to tackle with all the separate platforms, but garnering more insight and knowledge about the benefits of a presence management tool and putting it to use will bring benefits in both short and long term to POI’s, Brands and Service Providers. Remember the better the visibility of your merchants, networks, franchises or customers, (POI) the better your brand recognition, loyalty and return.
If you see the value in including a presence management module into your business offers but aren’t sure where to start. Book a free consultation with us today.
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