An Easy Way to Get Your Massage Business Found on Google

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Without a doubt you are aware of the importance of reviews. When you go over to Amazon to look for a book, as an example, what is the first thing you do? You take a look at the book reviews.

It's human nature to turn to other consumers for assistance in making decisions to purchase things. In the case of Amazon.com, that group of people is various book enthusiasts. With massage and bodywork services, that community of people is other massage therapy consumers.

Web visitors don't believe a business will deliver objective guidance on their website. They are skeptical and rightly so. So they seek feedback from customers for the truth. They recognize that individuals who have used the business services before will happily share their frank feelings about a business they've used and will truly give them the good, bad and ugly.

There are a ton of review sites. And a ton is a lot.

Right now I want to focus your attention on a specific sort of review website: The 'map site'. The ones that we look at this week are the three big ones and the ones that we should pay attention to. StatsCan, the government branch responsible for census data in Canada, recently reported (2009) that 52% of Canadians engage in online window shopping. I'm sure that consumers in other places in the world act in a similar way.

It's the job of search engines to deliver relevant results to searchers. So they put a large emphasis on local businesses because that's what people most often search for. Google a local service right now. You'll notice that the local business listings are an integrated part of their mapping systems. Yahoo and Bing (Microsoft's search engine) do exactly the same kind of thing.

You can plainly see that these listings are given special prominence on the search results page. This is big! Getting listed in Google's local results is surprisingly easy. For the most part it's a matter of filling out your listing fully and soliciting a few reviews.

You might be surprised to find out that you may be showing up at the top now without realizing it.

Your company name appears and is hyperlinked to your website. You can see that the phone number is likely displayed beside your website URL. And what's really important is the links to reviews for that business. Before even looking at your site, people want to know what others have to say about your business, so they click to read reviews.

Check it out in Google. Type 'massage [your city]' or '[any type of service] [your city]' and take a look at the results. When you click a review link you will see a Google Places listing. This listing contains information that Google has found on that business from phone directories and other sites like review sites. If you look through the Google Places listing a little you'll see customer reviews.

If you claim the listing as belonging to you, you can edit it, correct any mistakes and beef up the information to get prospective patients to make the decision to book an appointment.

You can really showcase your strengths by filling out the listing completely. Reviews left by your customers are invaluable for strengthening your credibility and you can certainly do a little work to make certain that your reviews are positive and reflect well on you and your massage business.

Eric Brown is the owner of BodyworkBiz, a web-based massage business website that delivers massage marketing courses, massage therapist business cards, patient education tools and more. Head over to BodyworkBiz at: http://www.bodyworkbiz.com/. Be sure to sign up for the free Massage Marketing Tips newsletter.