Google My Business listings entail critical business information such as a physical address, phone number, and email address, business hours, websites, and if available, photos, posts, and reviews. All these appear right in the search engine result pages, and the best part of it is you don’t need to pay a dime to secure a slot for your business. Despite that, very few companies take full advantage of the GMB platform, and the main culprit behind this tendency has been shown to be a lack of optimization know-how. This article will save you the trouble by providing you with five essential tips to turn your Google My Business listing into a killer lead generating tool for your business:
Create Google My Business AccountYou need a GMB account to optimize your Google Business profile. To create one, open Google.com/business, and use your business Gmail account to sign in. Avoid using your personal email address.
Fill every sectionGoogle ranks you higher in search results if your profile is complete, but that’s not all you get from submitting a fully filled-out section. It also provides customers with a greater range of actions to take when they bump into your profile. There is plenty of information to give, and if you are not sure of what’s needed, you can seek Google My Business Management services from profile optimization experts. Outsourced services will especially come in handy when filling out less obvious and ongoing sections such as Products and services, Category and Attributes, Reviews, Posts, and Reviews (both owner-generated and consumer-generated queries).
Optimize “from the business” sectionUnlike the short description right under the business name that Google generates for you, the “from the business” section in your reviews section is under your full control. Here’s how to optimize it:
Utilize all charactersFill the first 250 characters with key detailsInsert keywordsAvoid HTML and linksPick a categoryThe benefits of choosing a category when optimizing your Google My Business listing include increasing your chances of appearing in discovery searches and underlining category-specific features. Google provides businesses with a wide range of categories. It’s important to select the correct one for relevance and ease of being found.
When using categories to optimize your GMB listing, always be specific with your description and utilize secondary categories, but make sure not to overdo it.
Include photosYou may have noticed that Google displays photos too in local results these days. Apparently, adding some to your profile increases your ranking and visibility. More to the point, uploading photos regularly signals that your business is active, which adds to your ranking points. That is not to say that you should add dozens of photos to your Business Profile at once. Google would view that as spamming and probably hit you with penalties.
Endnote
Your Google My Business listing should focus on providing quality, relevant, and accurate information about your local business. Keep the above tips in mind when optimizing yours. Also, make sure to keep abreast of any changes that Google might make to their GMB algorithm and perform tweaks accordingly.
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