The Importance of a Google My Business Profile
When a consumer does Internet searches for a particular product or service on Google, the first several entries after the highest paid ranking ads are the Google My Business listings. Google My Business listings are incredibly important for customers to find your business, and having your Google My Business listing formatted correctly and with up to date information will ensure that you get maximum exposure in search rankings.
There are many benefits of a Google My Business profile.
Before we go into the details of why this profile is important, let’s take a look at how you can actually set it up:
How To Set Up Your Google My Business Profile
Google My Business is a very basic type of client relationship management system, and helps clients get the information they need at a glance across multiple devices and it helps clients find you in their local area. Setting up Google My Business is simple, and understanding that it will help you greatly once active.
If you are already on Google Plus, Google My Business operates as a complimentary adjunct to your Google Plus account. It is advisable to set up a local page, where clients around your geographical location are able to find and visit your business. This helps you rank better in area based search engine queries. Instead of a Google Plus page, you are now invited to set up a Brand Page by Google, which is designed to better serve the needs of a business.
Between a Google Brand and a Local Page listed on Google My Business, you have helped create more backlinks to boost your website and your digital footprint will be enhanced. Choosing a category for your business is critical, and ensure that you do this well, as the type of products and services that you offer will be compared to your Google ranking for your website, SEO and metadata.
It is important to set up your profile completely and correctly.
If your website matches well with your online presence, and you have categorised your business correctly, it will increase your ranking in searches. Google helps consumers be matched up with the best service provider or retailer to help them find a particular solution, and you can take best advantage of this by working within Google’s guidelines for the My Business Listings.
Other Ways To Enhance Your Google My Business Listing
Google rejects duplicate pages, so you need to ensure that you have removed all replicas of your Google My Business Listing, as these are rated as spam and can negatively affect your page rankings.
The right images and information placed on your Google My Business page is also really critical to enhancing your online presence. It is a complement to your website, and so should reflect your brand and be given appropriate attention to detail.
So let’s have a look at some of the reasons why a Google My Business profile is so important:
1. Cost Effective Way of Advertising
When a business wants to maximise the investment that they have in their marketing budget, they need to ensure that all available free channels are utilised in the best possible way. Google has created the My Business ad service as a way of improving the way that customers interact with your company. They have offered this as a free service.
Your profile is another way of getting the word about your business out.
To best utilise this service, it is imperative that business and marketing managers understand and use the service properly. There are a number of ways of using this free service provided by Google.
2. Improves Your Online Presence
By having all of your relevant information encapsulated into your Google My Business Profile, you can provide a snapshot of your business that appears up high in search rankings. It is important that all of your information is up to date, and that you claim your listing.
Google automatically indexes your business and takes information from your website and other places where your information has appeared. It does this to provide information about your business to your clients.
When you claim your Google My Business profile you are best positioned to be able to optimise it. When you place your own branding on there, and ensure that your contact details are up to date, include your latest products and services, a link to your blog and social media pages, and also include your opening hours, consumers are in the best position to select your business to serve their needs in a particular geographical area.
3. New Ways To Get Ahead Of Your Competitor
If you competitor is unaware of the Google My Business facility, and your business listing has been claimed and optimised by you, then that means your business has a better chance of outranking the other listings.
Better analyse your data which can help you beat your competitors.
You have an opportunity to see who your direct competitors are in your area and in what category they are competing in. You may be able to gain a competitive and strategic advantage in ensuring that you are able to position yourself by branding yourself in the best possible light.
4. Mobile Optimisation of Google My Business
Google My Business works best when it is mobile optimised. A lot of searches are now done from mobile devices, so it is imperative to ensure that clients can ring straight through to you from either your website or through your Google My Business Listing.
There are a few ways of ensuring the mobile responsiveness of your Google My Business site, and these should be adhered to for the best possible user experience. Mobile optimisation is not just important for your profile, but for your actual website as well. If you would like to know more details, have a read of our previous blog.
5. Google My Business Reflects the Nature of Your Company
When you have taken the due care and attention to your Google My Business page and ensured that your business is at the forefront of branding and managing customer relations in the best possible way, you are providing an idea to clients and potential consumers, and to the public in general a snapshot of what they can expect from your business.
Your digital presence is created from a number of different sources, and SEO is definitely enhanced by using multiple channels to collate a portfolio of information about your business.
6. Optimise Reviews and Feedback
Customer reviews are essential to your business.
With feedback given on the Google My Business page, you have the option of how to respond to and manage this. It is important to know how to deal with negative feedback and to try to resolve any issues that clients have had with your business, product or service. If this is not resolved, then an explanation, or simply an online management plan of unsolicited criticism should be responded to appropriately.
You can direct traffic from your website to your Google My Business page, and also encourage your satisfied customers to write helpful and positive reviews about your business on the Google My Business page.
With the combination of good images, proper brand placement, consideration to content and right categorisation and the right information about your company, a Google My Business Page is an excellent way to promote your enterprise.
7. SEO is Collated by Google Over a Number of Ways
Page ranking in the Google search engine is determined by algorithms that comb through the Internet, and build an idea of how well your business presents online. It collates reviews, website content, metadata, backlinks and checks for quality of what is presented about your enterprise on the Internet.
It is therefore really important to utilise whatever Google provides as a free tool such as Google My Business in order to enhance SEO. Google has spent a lot of time examining the ways that people search for products and services online.
A Google My Business Profile makes it a lot easier for potential customers to find you.
This means that they are finding the best possible way to ensure that business and products and services are matched to the right customer. The way that this is done is through SEO, and Google My Business is designed to help a company simply and professionally work on improving their digital footprint.
You can independently enhance your brand’s SEO by setting up your Google My Business pages correctly and according to Google’s recommendations. Google is integrating this information now into your page rankings, and it is imperative that if you want good SEO, that you take advantage of every way possible to improve SEO.
8. Google My Business Helps to Build Consumer Trust
Search bots are designed to filter out bad service providers by highlighting the best businesses, and also by presenting reviews of a product or service. When Google My Business is updated and managed properly by a business owner, it ensures that brand trust is enhanced, because the page is not left to simply sit and be neglected.
Consumers like attention to detail and this is important when a consumer looks through page rankings. Ideally your business would be listed three times on the first page for relevant keywords, including Google Adwords at the top, Google My Business secondly, and in the organic searches towards the top in order to really enhance your rankings.
This is done through comprehensive campaigns towards building SEO. Between backlinking, relevant content that matches with your products and services, having the right metadata, and providing reviews and responses, and also through quality backlinks, SEO can be all created to improve rankings.
A Google My Business profile adds another layer of trust consumers have in your business.
Understanding the nature of online consumer behaviour, particularly for your industry is imperative if you want to have any kind of success with online business. Any business that does not have an online presence also benefits greatly from Google My Business.
This is because regardless of whether or not a website is hosted by a business, a Google My Business page should be maintained as a basic minimum in order to disseminate to consumers what kind of information that you want them to know about your business.
9. E-Commerce and Other Businesses Can Benefit
When investing in a website, a business desires as much traffic to be pulled to their site as possible. This can be enhanced and improved from adding a lot of information about that enterprise from a Google My Business Page.
You can quickly update a Google My Business page, perhaps a lot faster than a website, as the Google My Business Page is a microsite, and contains a capsule type experience of what your business does.
10. A Succinct and Comprehensive Profile Helps Busy Consumers
Companies that want to improve their online visibility can use Google My Business. It enables consumers to find them on Google Maps and get directions to your business on their mobile, and can also be given a three dimensional tour of your company prior to them visiting.
A Google My Business profile provides a snippet of all the important information about your business.
It helps customers provide reviews on your products and services. You can add to the functionality of your customers being able to click directly through to your business phone number or website, which will save them time and enable a greater level of convenience to your clients.
Conclusion
Google My Business is an incredible tool now offered by Google as an additional service for companies to enhance consumer experience. It can offer increased online visibility for your enterprise, and encourage consumer confidence from the availability of reviews about your business. It is important tool to help build your SEO, and is a free way to advertise and engage consumers with your products and services.
Do you have a Google My Business Profile? Hopefully this article covered all the main points. If you feel as though something has been left out, let us know in the comments below, we would love to get your feedback.
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