Google My Business is one of the most powerful tools in Google’s vast array of products. In today’s blog post, we are going to show you how using Google My Business can improve your local SEO with just a few small changes.
1. Make sure your listing on Google My Business (GMB) is accurate in all areas from Name, Address and Phone Number (also known as NAP) to business hours. Your GMB page should mirror your website page in these areas as well as any place that your business is listed. We use Moz Local to help with our NAP listings and have found it to be helpful. If you are not finding your business in maps or in search, errors on your GMB page could be a reason why
2. Get reviews AND respond to them. Google recently acknowledged that while 5 star reviews are good, they really want to see businesses interacting with their customers. If you get a good 5 start review, be sure to thank your reviewer for their review and their business. If you get a less than stellar review, responding to the reviewer in a nice, positive way to ask about their experience and how you can improve your service is helpful knowledge.
3. Another Google My Business ranking factor is actually 3 factors according to Yoast: Relevance, Distance and Prominence. Relevance has to do with how well your business fits the search query. Be very specific in your listing about your business and this will help your relevance score. Distance equates with the proximity of the user to your business. Businesses that are closest to the user tend to show toward the top in search results. Of course, with many things Google related, how this algorithm works is a bit of a mystery but it is a top GMB ranking factor. Finally, lets talk about Prominence. Prominence has more to do with your website than GMB but is still used as a ranking factor. Do you have a lot of quality backlinks on your website? Are you an authority or top business in your area? Do you have awards? These all relate to Prominence and Google My Business uses it highly in local business SEO optimization
4. Google My Business improves your Google Maps location placement. Every local business wants to be featured in the top 3 results and an optimized Google My Business Listing is a good way to achieve this. Sources say that 86% of people look up the location of a business on Google Maps. This is huge for local businesses and one of the best ways to achieves search dominance!
5. Finally, keep your Google My Business account current with recent photos, posts and activity. GMB Is not just.a “set it up and forget” it type of platform. In fact, once you have a GMB account and you haven’t updated for a while, Google will politely remind you by email. You may think of this as just one more thing you have to do but it really is important.
Hopefully these tips and tricks on how Google My Business can improve your local SEO will help improve your search ranking. For more SEO tips, be sure to contact us. We love helping local businesses improve their SEO!
