Creating a good business profile over the internet is as important as creating a Linkedin profile for your career. The better it looks, the better the success prospective. Even if you have not created a profile for your business on the internet yet, we are here to successfully take you through the easiest and most convenient way of ensuring long-term success in your business venture, The Google My Business tool. Google My Business Listing can help you improve your business and ROI, if you have optimized your Google My Business Listing perfectly. Let’s take a look at steps that you can take for your Google My Business Listing Optimization.
What is Google My Business?
Google My Business (GMB) is a convenient, free and easy to use tool which assists you in managing your online business profile in Google search and Google maps, the place where most of the potential customers look for their purchase or service rendering. It targets the right audience, at the right time, if you follow some basic and easy steps for optimizing your profile.
When you visit google, and search for any business, you will see a card or panel which contains relevant information about the local businesses of their interest in that area. This is the spot, where you can ensure that whenever a potential customer searches for your area. Your venture pops up first.
Why should you focus of optimizing your Google My Business Listing?
Many of you might be think why do you need Google My Business listing optimization. There is not one but many reasons for you to know.
First, GMB increases visibility and online presence of your business, which helps draw the potential customers to your place.
Second, it allows the customers to look for the best option in the market, and choose among them.
Third, this feature allows more traffic to your online presence, such as websites or any social channels that you run on any social media platform.
Fourth, GMB allows for the customers to know more about your business, products, services, location and experience of other customers while dealing with you.
This is why, it is extremely important for you to know How to optimize My Google business listing and turn the flow into your favour for a long time.
Now we are going to tell you some most important and vital steps that help you in engaging more people into your venture, with the help of Google My business listing.
Some Popular Stats and Figures on Google My Business Listing
- As per the source, almost 60% of the American adults search local products and services using their smartphones and tablets.
- 50% of the mobile searchers are looking for local business of their nearby locations.
- 68% of the local searchers take help of “get directions” and “click to call” using a mobile phone.
- Almost 46% searchers on Google are local.
Accurate business description and latest updated information on Google My Business Listings
If you are new to GMB (Google My Business Listing), the first thing you need to do is ensure that all the information relevant to your business is accurate, up to date and informative, without leaving any scope of misinformation. This includes
- Business name
- Business address
- Contact Number – Both mobile and Landline, if possible.
- Hours of Operation
- Category of business
- Days when the business is usually closed, including public Holidays.
- Current status of Business, open or closed.
If you fail to provide any of this information, suppose the days when it is usually closed, a customer who finds your business and drives there, will leave disheartened to see that it is closed. This may not be a very good advertising effect.
Provide your business category
If you are familiar with how to generate leads with google business listing, you will know the importance of providing a category. There are two types of category, Primary and secondary category.
E.g – you are a restaurant owner. Your primary category will be “Restaurant - Food and drinks”, your secondary categories can be many, depending on your decision. They can be Italian, Chinese, Fine Dining, Rooftop, Bar etc, depending upon the type of restaurant you own.
This will help people find you in two ways, first when they are looking for an eatery, and second when they are looking for a specific category which only your restaurant in the area provides.
Give a detailed and attractive description
Google My Business listing optimization works effectively when you are able to communicate with the viewers, without actually communicating with them. This means, describing to them in detail, your venture, your specialities, your area of expertise, and why they should choose you.
If you do not know how to particularly attract customers, through these techniques, you can take the help of a local SEO Marketing company or a local SEO Marketing agency. They will explain and provide to you, valuable information on how to optimize my google business listing with the help of description marketing.
Any expert would recommend, not too long, yet not too short description, which ranges between 600-800 words max. this description should not tell your ideas and services like a story, but should be able to connect to the readers instantly.
Upload attractive Images
It is a verified fact that business who put images of their establishment receive 42% more driving location requests through potential customers and 35% more audience in their website, as compared to the businesses who do not have pictures uploaded online.
Let us take the example of a restaurant again. You own a restaurant, and a customer finds your business information online. Along with it, he finds attractive pictures of your ambience, your storefront, logo etc, which makes him instantly think that your place deserves a chance.
Now let us assume you did not have pictures, but the restaurant next to you did. The customer will potentially look at their pictures, and even if your food is better, they would not know that, because the lack of images causes an absence of information regarding your quality and services.
This is how you might lose a customer if you do not know how to generate leads with google business listing since better images and information not only help customers but also higher your SEO rankings in Google.
A local SEO marketing agency will help you in choosing what kinds of images to put online. You can show your products, your menus (if you own a restaurant), your office, your ambience etc.
Images might also turn into videos, If you want!
Why just images, you can also upload videos of your place. Describing videos, explanatory, promotional, or even videos created by customers can be uploaded. It will give you exponential benefit, if a customer uploads a video, describing your venture.
Let your customers help you too!
Do not just allow images or the videos to be uploaded from your side, open the option for the customers also, so that when they visit and take pictures of your place, they can put it up online. This creates an aura of authenticity in your marketing.
If you are opening up this feature, make sure you have the capacity to filter out images you do not want. These may include unrelated images, useless images or images of some other business, mistakenly sent to your GMB.
Set up the review column and reply to all of them
Nothing delights the customer, and promotes a healthy image than showing that you care for your customers. GMB has options of reviewing the services granted, and leaving comments on them. This leads to you getting stars out of Five, and comments from your customers.
Make sure that all the reviews given (positive or negative) are appreciated by you, and an apt response is given, which caters to the needs of the customers. If they are unhappy with your service, ask them where you lacked, and what improvement can be done to make their next visit better.
In this way, your customers will fell that their opinions value to you. This will also ensure that they do not provocatively downgrade your ratings in GMB. Look from their point of view, and reply to all of them.
The key is to keep yourself in their position, and then ask “what would I expect, if I were the customer?”, and you’ll get the answer.
Make sure to:
Address all the reviews
Reply to all the reviews
Do not try to defend or hide negative comments or ratings.
Provide effective and speedy resolution of their problems, if possible.
All this will also ensure that you get higher rankings in GMB from google. You can also take help from Google my business listing optimization services for replying in a professional manner.
Promote your business with content and offers
Generally, when It comes to promotion and marketing, there was not much to do in GMB. However, in2917, after rolling out of Google Posts by Google, you can share your content in Google search and maps also. This can include blog articles, upcoming events, offers, discounts or any other form of promotion which helps. In Google my Business listing optimization services by Local SEO Marketing Company, you can hire professions for creating attractive content for you.
It is an amazing feature, and you can create attractive content, which catches the eyes of the viewers. For E.g if you have a restaurant, and there was a live band performing, you can use google posts to inform the viewers about it.
Set up messaging
Nowadays, almost all your customers are smartphone users. so why not introduce a text feature, where they can directly contact you without ringing? Google messages on GMB, allows the customers or viewers to send messages directly to your phone, from Google business.
All you need to do is enable the “Messaging” tab in GMB dashboard. Your phone number will not be displayed in the text, and when you receive a message it will be under “customer messages”.
Just like any other form of Google SEO strategy, you can use Google My business strategic advantage to gain points over your competitors. Your focus should mainly be on authentic and relevant information, and good response system to the customers, which makes them feel welcomed. A specific ranking factor is not known by many who use this service, but you can do all that is possible in order to higher up your rankings. Giving the viewers what they want, in our opinion, is ultimately the best strategy to do that.
If you are still not sure, how to optimize your business ranking in GMB, we suggest you take professional assistance from leading Google my business listing optimization services, because they are an expert in their fields, and more than us, they know how to higher up your rankings in Google