Google recently announced “Google My Business” a new unified interface designed to make life easier for local businesses and brands to be better searched within Google search engine. The online store owners can directly use Google My Business for free to connect with customers globally. Currently, the store merchants use different store locator extensions to handle necessary functionality. But with the released guidelines for Google My Business it has now become easy for store owners to display the store’s physical locations on the web.

Here are some of the guidelines you need to consider before making your storefront an SEO powerhouse.

Make sure each of your locations has its own URL. Also, make sure that Google can index those URLs containing the physical store information.

Have a mobile friendly website.

Use proper schema.org microdata markup for local businesses.

Make sure to have a Google My Business local page for each of your physical store locations

There is a major difference between a Google Plus business (brand) and Google My Business. Both are Google Plus pages but have different layouts and functions all together. While your Google + business is used as a brand page and Google My Business is specially used by the users to leave reviews of the single branch they are visiting online instead of the brand as a whole. This is the reason why each of your physical stores needs its own Google My Business page.

For creation and verification of your local business on Google My business you must have a mailing address or business phone to be able to verify the location.

If you’d like to promote a brand, product, organization or any other entity without an address you should instead create a brand page.

Use of schema.org microdata markup for local businesses

Here is a very good example from Google for listing a store with opening to closing hours using a proper schema.org microdata markup:

The benefit of having an active Google+ page for Ecommerce

There are millions of active users online. You should go for active Google+ as who knows what the conversion rate of visitors on your store will be in the near future. Using Google+ you can target your audience and might also gain a huge popularity in short period of time. Even if no one makes a purchase from your store still there are some hidden benefits of using Google+ as an ecommerce brand.

If a user is searching for your brand name, Google picks the data from Wikipedia, free base, and similar resources to compile some facts about your brand. But it may happen that Google shows the name of your competitor as well. You can’t help showing the name of the competitor to the user but you can definitely influence the content of yours by editing any wrong facts that might be there at the sources.

All thanks to Google Plus. You can now link your Google plus brand page and your website and get exciting new features. The follow button will allow the user to follow your brand directly from the search result pages and my personal favorite, the recent post section which will display your latest share from your Google plus account.

This will not only help you to target more audience but gain more followers as well as flexible promote your brand from the SERPs. You can also speed up your indexing when you share a URL through Google+ and it will get indexed within 6 seconds.

With Google new release of Google My Business, you can surely promote your online store locally, target more audience to get new products and also speed up your indexing fast and quicker.