For storage facilities, being found in local search requires hard work and, well, luck. If you have a website, you already put the work into increasing your search engine rank by adding content to your site, getting listed on local directories, and making sure that you abide by the latest search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines. The luck, however, came in getting new customers, readers, and industry partners to your site on a regular basis.
While these two ideas seem to be the perfect match for getting your facility found in local searches online, Google has made it a little more difficult with their latest update to Google Neighborhood.
Google Neighborhood, while not new, is the latest update to Google’s local search algorithm. It recognizes your storage facility for neighborhood (or suburban) searches and makes it easy for potential customers to find you if they live in the same area. For some storage facilities, namely those without a website, the chances of being found have dwindled immensely though—even if their facility name, location, and phone number are across multiple local listing directories.
The reason for this is because Google runs primarily on recognizing websites and pages through Google My Business, a free local directory run off of your Google+ page. So not having a website is going to make it difficult for Google to show your facility in neighborhood searches.
Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to make your storage facility’s local rank go up a bit, even if you do not yet have a website.
- Add your neighborhood’s name to the end of your storage facility’s name on your Google My Business page (e.g., “Your Storage Facility – Neighborhood”).
- Add your neighborhood name into the business description on your Google My Business page.
- Add the neighborhood name to all of your current local listings.
These steps are all very easy to change and will impact where your storage facility is showing up, but they are only short-term solutions.
The easiest (but sometimes most difficult and/or expensive) solution is to create a website if you don’t currently have one. The metadata a website provides to Google makes finding your facility and placing it accordingly in local search that much easier. Without this, Google doesn’t know how to display any of your facility’s details.
