How To Optimize Your profile On Google My Business and Add New Features That Can Help Potential Customers.
When it comes to building your business online, there are plenty of options to use, and that’s the problem. It’s hard to keep up and keep track of what you have to do on which platform and when. This leads to a lot of floundering. When it comes to creating buzz locally, many businesses assume that all they need to do is slap together a few ads and some of the major keywords and the customers will flock to the site.
Capitalizing on local SEO requires a strategy, especially with a pandemic that has left many local businesses struggling. With the help of Google My Business, GMB, businesses have a better chance of capturing and even expanding their customer base. GMB helps them leverage their location-based assets in a targeted way, no matter where the customers are and especially when they’re ready to buy. A fully optimized GMB profile accomplishes three major objectives:
- Control over business information: To a business, staying top-of-mind is essential. Google my business listings can include basic and NAP information, name, address and phone number, as well as reviews and offerings. If you are a restaurant for example, GMB provides you the opportunity to entice customers with timely menus and specials. You can even encourage them to leave positive reviews that you can highlight instead of leaving reputation management up to sites you can’t control.
- Better established credibility: More than 80% of searches are looking for local information with a well-done GMB listing, you’re almost 40% more likely to get in-store foot traffic from customers intending to buy. The more information you share about your business, the more likely potential customers are to trust you and your brand with their time and money.
- Better discoverability: This is where keywords come into play. By combining prepositional phrases, such as “near me” along with the city name, companies with a Google My Business listing have a better chance of showing up on page one of a search.
How to Optimize for Google My Business
There are more than a few effective ways to use your Google My Business listing to get more customers. Verifying your account is just the start. To ensure that you build your optimization goals on a solid foundation, what you publish on your profile makes a significant difference to getting more local customers and sales over time.
Fill Out All of Your Information
One of the best ways to get started on the right foot with GMB is to fill out all the information. The main reason is people use many ways to search for what you have to offer, apart from your business name. They can reference a product name they scanned in your listing or even a phrase that stuck out, Like your tag line. Completely filling out your information ensures that you have all bases covered.
Post Unique, Quality Photos
Photos do more than just speak a thousand words when you’re online. They generate more click-throughs and sales from customers who are close to the last stage in the buyer’s Journey. In many cases, photos are dealmakers you would rather include than exclude.
Take Advantage of Local Posts
The Google Suite of products and services is vast and useful. GMB posts sprinkled with specific keywords keep your business presence fresh and increase engagement. These can be about events, products, or services you have. While they seem insignificant, local posts provide a vital cross-linking opportunity, because they can also be published to Google Search and Google Maps, further expanding your reach.
Add Category-specific Features
This is the one GMB tool that shouldn’t be bypassed. Category-specific features give you an extra opportunity to show what your business has to offer. Depending on your type of business, you’ll get the option to have users book time for your services online or show off products, listings, or amenities. Be as specific as you can with your brand category, because it could be a search parameter. If your niche isn’t in the list, work with the general category that accurately describes your product or service.
Encourage and Respond to Reviews
When reviews are great, all is well, but when they’re not, many businesses tend to hide. Encouraging customers and clients to share their honest feedback is a great way to increase your business visibility. Responding to reviews, even the more critical ones, helps you to take more control of the narrative and shows potential customers that you take the services you provide seriously. Treat reviews like insight that will help you to better optimize your business.
Add Videos That Work For Your Brand
YouTube has become one of the most prolific video search engines. If you can conceive it, there’s probably a video for it. This is important to note because 81% of viewers give all or most of their attention to videos. It’s a great medium for telling stories, and your business has plenty of stories to tell. Educational videos, particularly in-depth How to/Tutorials, along with Q&A and even behind-the-scenes videos are some of the popular categories. It’s all about choosing the type of video content that best fits your brand and narrative.
One of the best ways to better understand your Google My Business SEO is with Google Analytics. This tool allows you to see how your local SEO is working. For example, if you’re seeing that your GMB traffic spike on a Tuesday, you can drill down to see where the traffic is coming from and how customers were navigating your listing. It’s all about finding those avenues people use to get to your business and integrating them into your strategy.
Google My Business is one of the many ways to grow your customer base and improve local SEO. If you’re looking for other strategies that will make your business more profitable, get started with Otaliems Academy today.
