Making the most of Google My Business
Success with SEO for local business has always been challenging. From link building to on-page and technical SEO, you still have to get the fundamentals right.
Google My Business is an easy option to use. Without a well-optimised listing, your chances of appearing in Google features are slim. With 97% of consumers looking online for local businesses, you need to do everything you can to be visible.
Setting Up Google My Business
- Every business should have a fully optimized and up-to-date Google My Business profile, but this is particularly the case for local businesses.
- It’s free and easy to set up a Google My Business listing – just search Google My Business click “Start Now” and start filling in your basic business information.
- Make sure to fill in essential items like your business category, contact information and opening hours and upload plenty of good quality images, to give customers a visual representation of your business.
- One more thing to note is it’s essential that the name, address and phone number of the business match what’s on the website.
- Although it seems basic, making mistakes like choosing the wrong category or having different contact information to what’s on your website is likely to have a negative effect on your local rankings.
Posts
If your business has a special event, offer or you want to highlight a specific product or service, check out the Posts feature, which you can access by navigating to “Posts” in the left-hand menu.
They’re really quick to set up, but you still don’t see too many of them on the SERPs, meaning they’re a great way to stand out on Google.
Reviews
Reviews are neither a new or little-known feature of Google My Business. But there’s still opportunity to stand out on the crowded local SERP if you take proper advantage.
First of all, you should be actively cultivating reviews and asking customers for feedback. Then, once a review has been left, respond to it! Whether good or bad, you should be responding to all reviews.
Common Google My Business Mistakes To Avoid
As mentioned above, incorrect business information is one of the most common business mistakes, which is easy to fix.
- One of the other things you’ll want to look out for is duplicate listings. It’s worth checking if a business has any other GMB profiles set up already.
- Another common mistake is a business setting up a new listing when it moves to a new location – again, you need to just update the information on your existing listing, rather than creating a new one and ending up with duplicates.
- Often, you might see things other than the business name in the business name field – for example, adding a promotional message, or the business location. This is pretty common, but the only thing that’s allowed in this field is the actual business name, and nothing more.
- Although local SEO success will require work on aspects of technical SEO, content, and off-page SEO like any other SEO project, Google My Business lays a strong foundation.