With internet becoming ubiquitous and a dominant force over the last decade or so, today more and more people are searching for local businesses on internet; restaurants, hospitals, clinics, shops and many other local businesses and services. In the online marketing world, the practice of people searching local businesses and services is referred as ‘local SEO.’ Your success in local SEO hinges on one big factor. Your ability to expand Google My Business Reach. If you somehow succeed in achieving this then nothing can possibly stop your business from dominating the local search results.
Kindly note that Google My Business or GMB is now known as Google Business profile. However, for the sake of convenience, we will use both these names interchangeably in this blog post.
What really is Google My Business?
Google My Business is a 100% free tool from Google that lets businesses to manage their online search across Google and Google Maps. It is like having your own shop in the online world where customers visit to get information about your business.
To use this free tool, you obviously have to create an account, which barely takes few minutes.
Below is the list of information that Google Business Profile provides about your business:
- Business name, address, and phone number (NAP).
- Business hours
- Photos and videos
- Customer reviews
- Products and services
- Maps and directions
- Website link
This is how typically your Google Business Profile looks like on Google Search.
It basically appears on the top right-hand side of Google search page or SERP.
Importance of My Google Business
Before we start sharing the tips on how to expand MY Google Business reach, let us first understand its importance and how it can benefit your business.
Increases online visibility incredibly:
We intentionally used the word ‘incredibly’ here. That’s because if your business is listed in Google Business Profile then there is a bright chance that your business can appear on the top of Google search page, which can open up many possibilities for your business growth.
Map visibility:
It helps in showing your business’ exact location on Google Maps, making it easier for your potential customers to find and locate the exact location of your business.
Leveraging customer reviews:
It makes easier for your customers to leave a review about your business. If your positive reviews greatly outnumber negative reviews then this will most certainly help your business.
Direct communication with customers:
It facilitates direct communication with your customers by allowing you to directly respond to customers reviews including negative reviews. This helps in building trust and loyalty for your business.
Increases brand awareness:
As your business’ visibility increases in the local search results, so does its brand awareness. As a result, not only more local people will come to know about your business but they are also more likely to trust your business, increasing the credibility of your business and also leading to more growth opportunities.
Zero investment:
As mentioned above, Google Business Profile is a 100% free tool and thus requires zero investment. What’s even better, with zero investment, your business stands the chance of enjoying incredible high ROI in the form sales and leads.
Increases customer engagement:
By allowing you to upload photos and videos, it serves as a great platform to promote your business’ products and services as well as special events like product launch and monsoon/summer sale.
Tips & Proven strategies to expand Google My Business Reach
As you must have already guessed that Google Business Profile plays a crucial role in the local SEO success. But merely making an account won’t get you anywhere. You’ve to properly optimize your profile and also make an extra effort to go an extra mile to leverage this tool for your business growth.
Here are some of the essential and simple tips that will eventually help in expanding your Google My Business Reach
Step 1: Properly optimize your profile:
First thing first, you need to ensure that you are inserting complete and accurate information about your business in your Google Business Profile account. This includes name, address and phone number, popularly referred with a short-form ‘NAP.’
Make sure that the NAP details you’re mentioning in GMB are consistent and exactly the same as you’ve mentioned in other business directories and also your social media accounts.
Inconsistent NAP is considered as a poor SEO practice as far as local SEO is concerned.
Mentioned below are more tips for optimizing your GMB profile
- Choose proper category/categories that accurately describes your business.
- Write a persuasive business description that is informative and also highlights your business’ USP.
- Upload high-quality images of your business; be it the photos of your products and services or offices.
- Mention your business hours and keep updating it even for holidays. Highlighting whether your business will be operating during public holidays or not will be of great help for your customers.
Step 2: Ask and collect reviews:
Reviews especially positive reviews play a crucial role in your local SEO success. The more reviews you have, the greater the chances that your Google Business Profile listing will pop up whenever someone types a keyword related to your business. Therefore, try to collect as many reviews as possible from your satisfied customers. However, don’t be too pushy. Always be gentle and courteous when asking for reviews.
Equally important is to promptly respond to the reviews including negative reviews. Handling the latter can be a really tricky affair and mostly requires a cool and calm approach.
Above one of the tips recommends to create a custom review link.
Notably, you can create custom review link directly from Google My Business profile itself by clicking on ‘Ask for review’ option.
After clicking on the option, a pop-up box will emerge with a custom link. Just copy the link and paste wherever you want.
Kindly check the screenshot below to get more clarity
Step 3: Use Local SEO Strategies:
You’re unlikely to succeed in cracking the local SEO game unless you implement the local SEO strategies properly.
Mentioned below are the tips on how to leverage local SEO strategies
- Insert all your primary keywords in your Google My Business profile. This will ensure that your GMB profile pops up whenever people search with keywords related to your business. Do some keyword research to find out what are the primary and also secondary keywords related to your business.
- Apart from optimizing Google Business Profiles, it is equally important to optimize your website for local search by including all the main local keywords, inserting Google map and mentioning other information about your business.
- List on business directories: listing your business on reputed and trusted business directories related to your business is another good local SEO practice to follow. Make sure to follow consistent NAP.
I’d like to again highlight here that you must list your business only in trusted and reputed directories.
Step 4: Keep tracking your performance:
By consistently tracking the performance of your GMB account, you will come to know how much and exactly where do you need to improve. You will know approximately how many people viewed your Google Business Profile during a given period of time, how many people called or messaged you from your profile and few other valuable insights.
Conclusion:
There is no doubt that the path to success in Local SEO goes through your Google My Business profile or rather how well and efficiently you manage it. The importance of garnering positive reviews and efficient management of reviews cannot be more overstated. Reviews are to local SEO, what backlinks are to website. Harnessing the power of Google Business Profile is also important because it helps you in securing top position on Google search, which is otherwise a challenging task especially when it comes to ranking a website. Getting almost a top position on Google Search can seriously open the floodgates for several possibilities and different avenues for your business growth.