While we all know that getting seen online is a must in the digital age, mastering your Google Business Profile or your Google My Business listing is a must.
Once upon a time, we relied on a large stack of paper that we called phone books. In their heyday, they were a resource for connecting with not only individuals, but a key staple for how consumers connected and communicated with businesses. Today? We have Google My Business.
While search engines like Google dominate the world wide web, they’ve also rendered the concept of the phone book obsolete thanks to technologies like Google My Business. In simple terms, it’s a service provided by Google and Google Maps for brand owners to create, claim, manage and monitor an online listing of their business.
Although the primary purpose of Google My Business is to publicly list information such as your brand’s telephone number, location and operating hours, what many business owners don’t know is that much like the other functions of the search engine, your Google My Business listing can – and should – be properly optimised.
Five Tips For Managing Your Google My Business Listing
While the concept has recently been rebranded as Google Business Profile, the basic functionality of a Google My Business listing remains the same: to deliver the right information to specific questions asked by consumers on search engines.
In a perfect world, thousands of prospective customers already know about your brand, will use Google to track you down via your business name, and be presented with your Google Business Profile. In reality, this is rarely the case.
Google has done a top notch job of matching its search results to what users are really looking for. The search engine giant no longer just shows links based on keywords, but also takes user intent into consideration when deciding which site, listing, or webpage to display first.
As an example, try searching for a term like “best car dealership”. Google is now smart enough to know that you’re not necessarily on the hunt for the best car dealership in the world, but what’s within your vicinity that matches your intent.
In turn, Google delivers search results for local business listings based on data that it’s already collected from you. Understanding this and incorporating it into your optimisation strategy can be the key to attracting new clients, instead of seeing their valuable clicks go to a competitor’s listing.
In addition, the data shows that customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider your business reputable if you have a complete Google Business Profile – plus, they’re also 70% more likely to actually visit your location. To master your Google Business Profile and ensure that it’s properly optimised for your best shot at success, consider the following.
Ask For Reviews – Unlike many social media platforms, the public reviews listed on your Google Business Profile are almost impossible to remove. While this can at times be challenging to navigate, it also adds a level of authenticity to your brand if you’re at the top of your game, so be sure to ask your legion of loyal customers for their feedback via a review.
Actually Respond To Reviews – If someone has taken the time to publicly review your business on Google, it’s crucial to respond to them – regardless of whether the feedback is good or bad. Not only is it good for your audience to see you’re active and listening to feedback, but Google recognizes this as good practice as well, and will reward you for it accordingly.
Update Your Listing – When it comes to search engines, old news is bad news. To stay relevant and accurate, be sure to regularly update the information listed on your Google Business Profile. Make sure to indicate when your business will be closed for holidays or if your operating hours have changed, as this is often the quickest way to get a bad review.
Add Business Categories – As Google generally wants to keep things pretty straightforward, brands can only pick one primary category and ten additional ones. The list is always being updated, so it’s important to check these regularly to stay in the loop, particularly if you’ve already made the effort to properly optimise your website to be SEO friendly.
Don’t Forget The Visuals – New research shows that the quality of your photos published on your Google Business Profile has a direct impact on your listing’s performance on the search engines. As such, be sure to include specific images of a high standard that directly reflect your products or services, and include descriptive alt text to ensure that it’s ‘searchable’ online.
Needless to say, producing digital content that’s both user friendly and SEO friendly is hard. Even the most gifted of in-house marketers usually identify as either technical wizards, skilled visual gurus or natural born writers, but rarely ever is it all three. If your brand is struggling to produce top notch content that Google deems worthy enough to showcase, it might be time to consider outsourcing.
The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content
Producing quality, consistent and on brand content takes time, effort, experience and resources, but avoiding these responsibilities altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice. Thankfully, investing in a solid content marketing strategy has actually never been easier.
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
