The Ultimate Guide to Optimize Google My Business Listing
Information that you add to your Google My Business account appears on a number of Google channels, including Google Maps and Google Search. The intent behind creating Google My Business by the tech mogul, i.e. Google, itself is to combine all dashboards across local SEO products into a single easy-to-access place. As such, Google My Business Optimization Services have gained a lot of traction among new and extant businesses alike.
Google My Business page lets you control all information about your business listings across different locations over the Internet. While verifying your business with Google, you might need to wait for about 1 or 2 weeks before you receive a postcard with a special code at your business location. Afterward, you are ready to jump right into the Google My Business thing.
You might like to hire some suitable SEO corporation to assist you with all the hard work that an apt search engine optimization strategy would require. Anyways, let’s proceed with our GMB optimization guide.
Google My Business Optimization Guide
Here are 10 important Google My Business tips that will help your business escalate in the market and reach out to more potential customers and buyers looking for your products and offerings:
- Ensure the Business Address is Correct as well as Consistent – Because of the way local SEO works, having consistency in addition to correctness to your business name, address, and phone number is important to win the GMB (Google My Business) game. Your business needs to use the same NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) information across all your business listings. You can visit official Google support page for knowing more about Google’s instructions about the importance attached to the consistency of NAP.
- Update Correct Business Hours – Several businesses around the world shift their working hours once or twice a year. If you’re one of them and it’s been a while since you accessed your GMB account, then you should visit your account now. Check whether the available timings show the right time for clients to visit your business or not.
- Add all the Right Categories for your Business – Category is an important detail while setting up your Google My Business account. You need to add all relevant categories to your business. The more categories you have, the better are the chances for potential customers to find you. Even if you haven’t added all the category names when you set up the GMB page, you can add them now.
- Add Lots of Photographs Detailing Everything your Business is all About – Photos are very important in any Google My Business listing. Adding photos is a genuine way to display what your organization is all about and how does it do things. You need to add about 3 to 5 photographs each of:
- a. Key staff
- b. Checkout area or the reception desk
- c. Facilities or the retail area
- d. Satisfied customers
- e. Work in progress
- Provide Clients a 360-degree View or a Virtual Tour of your Business – The street view feature of Google Maps allows users to get a 360-degree view of a specific location. In order to add a 360-degree View of your business, you need to hire a Google-approved photographer. The professional will visit your business location and will take some photos. Sometime later, you can find a link on your GMB account for accessing the approved photos that you can add for providing a virtual tour of your business to prospective clients.
- The Importance of Introduction – An introduction to your business is a must. Moreover, this is the chance where you can describe your business clearly to the prospective clients. While coming up with a fitting introduction to your business, ensure to:
- a. Choose keywords with caution
- b. Keep it precise and concise
- c. Use sub-headings
- d. Keep the paragraphs short and crisp
- e. Use bullet points
- Display the Types of Payment you Accept – Before prospecting a business, clients might like to know about various payments the business accept. This is very important in the modern scenario, as there are dozens of payment options available. So, add types of payments your business accepts to let the prospective clients know it beforehand.
- Ask for Reviews – Reviews play an important role in SEO for any business and even affects SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) rankings. Because of its importance, Google allows businesses to ask customers for leaving reviews about their experience. The more positive reviews your business will have, the more comfortable and confident prospective clients will feel while involving with your business. Adding reviews about your business has become so much important that you need to devise a proper, workable reviews strategy for benefiting from user reviews.
- Always Respond to Reviews at the Earliest – Reviews might be negative and positive. And to be frank, getting strongly positive reviews require hard work in addition to providing quality services and offerings. That said, you need to make sure that you respond to every review you get, no matter how good or worse it is. While a simple thank you might suffice for positive reviews, negative reviews need to be handled with caution. However, several cases have demonstrated that handling negative reviews in the right way can produce one or many positive business effects.
- Don’t Forget to Spread the Word on Social Media – Social media is an important part of everyone’s life these days. People like to interact with friends, families, and even businesses over the social media. Therefore, you need to ensure that you take your business to various social media channels, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. to let people know and understand your business better. Though Google has specifically mentioned that social media standings don’t affect your SERPs rankings directly, experts believe that social media presence plays an important role indirectly.
Business owners and entrepreneurs often juggle responsibilities so it’s possible that as an immensely busy company head, you may not be able to use digital marketing to its fullest. So, it’s better to hire a reputed local SEO company to help you with Google Places Optimization.
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