According to Search Engine Land, Nearly 80 percent of local searches on a mobile device lead to a direct purchase within 24 hours. Of those purchases, 73 percent were done in a physical store, 16 percent by phone, and 11 percent online.

While many searchers are already committed to finding a business after doing some initial research, many are looking for a specific product or service with no particular business in mind.

Translation: your customers are out there, and they are ready to buy!

Great! So how do you get these buyers to come to you and your business? Well, the answer is pretty obvious yet critical to your success: get your business in those search results!

"But I'm just trying to run a small business, I don't know the first thing about getting in the search results!" you might say.

Fortunately, Google has provided the perfect tool to get you in those local searches. It's called Google My Business (GMB). GMB creates a map listing for local searches and shows the top three listings at the very top of those search results. These results are so relevant to the search that almost 50 percent of customers click on those top three listings.

It's simple enough that even your competitors probably have set it up. Fortunately for you, a majority of your competitors rush through creating it, don't optimize their listing, or don't know all of the ranking factors that go into it and end up seeing lackluster results because of it.

Two of the biggest ranking factors for your map listing are:

An optimally-created GMB listing
And citations or mentions of your business NAP (name, address, phone number) in high-quality directories and websites.
I'll show you exactly what I do to optimize a listing while getting some high-quality citations at the same time.

Okay, okay, but what does this mean for your business? Take a look at a recent client of mine, a small local service business getting most of its business from their Facebook page.

They went from nothing more than a Facebook page to these beautiful results in about three months. We quickly created a website, added some more social profiles, and focused on creating an optimized GMB listing with occasional updates. With that, they have seen an increase of 500 percent in sales.

What would a 500 percent increase in sales do for your business?

If that sounds good to you, then let's get started!