5 Ways to Optimize Google My Business for Local Search
Every small business should have a Google Business profile. Especially if you have a physical location, a Google Business profile can help bring more customers through your doors. Understanding how to leverage your Google Business profile will help increase your visibility on Google Search and connect with customers that are actively looking for your products or services.
TOC:
Google Posts
Business Information
Products and Services
Categories and Tags
Reviews
Google offers a lot of opportunities for local businesses to increase their visibility online.
Google Posts
Consistently posting to your Google Business profile will help refresh your business and improve your ranking on Google. Local businesses that post at least once a week can reach more search users organically than businesses that post just once a month.
Sharing resources from your website can also help build reliable backlinks from Google itself. Sharing blog posts, infographics, and other resources from your website on Google will help your profile and your website reach more people. This also increases the chances of your content reaching more people, which can encourage organic shares and exponentially more exposure.
Business Information
Consistent information about your business across all platforms is vital for Google validating your business as a reliable source of information. Your business bio should highlight key information that is relevant to your customer’s needs and is mentioned throughout your website and all other online platforms. Most importantly, your bio should target specific keywords that produce high volumes of monthly searches.
Your bios should also contain potent copy that can convert high intent users into website traffic and eventual leads. This will help produce more clicks and show Google that your website is more relevant to specific search phrases than others.
Products and Services
Google gives you the opportunity to list your products and services along with images and descriptions. This allows your profile to not only appear for searches about specific products or services, but give your products an opportunity to appear directly in the search results.
If someone is searching for your specific product or service, they will be more likely to come across your business profile on Maps or in the search results. If you sell lights at your store and have “wall sconces” as a category on both your website and in your Google products, anyone searching for wall sconces on Google or Maps will be much more likely to come across your website.
Categories and Tags
Choosing the right category and subcategories for your business will help determine what keywords and phrases your website appears for. It’s also important to list this same category for your business across all platforms, so there is no confusion for users or for Google about what your business is and does.
Reviews
Accumulating reviews is one of the most effective ways to increase your visibility on Google. They show Google that other users besides yourself believe that your business is a reliable source of information and should be experienced by others like them.
Google values reviews almost as much as the keywords you use and the amount of backlinks you have to your website. They indicate to other Google users that there are multiple unbiased opinions about how great your business is. Since Google wants to provide its users the best experience possible, they will use reviews as a way to prove that your business is the best possible result for that specific search query.
